Russia has sent additional police squads to temporarily occupied Mariupol to search for members of the resistance movement ahead of the sham presidential elections, said the advisor to the city’s mayor, Petro Andriushchenko.
Russia destroyed and overran Mariupol, a port city on the Azov Sea coast in Donetsk Oblast, home to nearly 500,000 people, early in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Most Mariupolites did not have a chance to evacuate, and the exact number of civilian casualties, estimated in the tens of thousands, remains unknown to this day.
“A large ‘clean-up operation’ is underway in Mariupol. Eleven police squads from St. Petersburg have arrived in the city to reinforce the unit of the Russian National Guard, which, in turn, has been subordinated to the FSB,” explained Andriushchenko.
The official predicts that Russian police will “shake up the entire city” and shoot fake videos with captured partisans to threaten Mariupol’s residents opposed to the Kremlin’s regime and improve the image of Moscow as a strong country.
Earlier, an explosion destroyed a Russian ammunition depot in Mariupol, according to the adviser. As a result of the blast, several occupiers were hospitalized.
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