Russian President Putin visits the occupied city of Mariupol

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the occupied port city of Mariupol, Russian state news agencies reported on Sunday, his first trip to Ukrainian territory that Moscow illegally annexed in September .

Earlier on Saturday, Putin traveled to Crimea, a short distance southwest of Mariupol, to mark the ninth anniversary of the annexation of the Black Sea peninsula to Ukraine. Mariupol became a global symbol of defiance after Ukrainian forces, outgunned and outmanned, held out at a steel mill there for nearly three months before Moscow finally took control in May.

The visits, during which he was shown chatting with local residents of Mariupol and visiting an art school and children’s center in Crimea, were a show of defiance from the Russian leader two days after a court issued a warrant for his arrest for war crimes. . Putin has not commented on the arrest warrant, which has deepened his international isolation despite the likelihood that he will face trial any time soon.

The trip also preceded a planned visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, which is expected to give Putin a major diplomatic boost in his confrontation with the West.

Putin arrived in Mariupol by helicopter and then wandered around the city’s “memorial sites”, the concert hall and the coastline, Russian media said, without specifying exactly when the visit took place. On Sunday, state broadcaster Rossiya 24 showed Putin chatting with locals outside what looked like a newly built residential complex and being shown around one of the apartments.

After his trip to Mariupol, Putin met with Russian military leaders and troops at a command post in Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia about 180 kilometers further east, reported Russian state media.

On Sunday, the Rossiya 24 channel showed Putin being greeted by Moscow’s senior officer in charge of the war in Ukraine, Valery Gerasimov, and led to a room where Gerasimov’s second-in-command and a group of uniformed men were waiting. . It has not been possible to independently confirm the circumstances in which the video was filmed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Sunday that the trip had not been announced and that Putin intended “to inspect the work of the (command) post in its ordinary mode of operation.” .

Speaking to state agency RIA on Sunday, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin made it clear that Russia is in Mariupol to stay. He said the government hoped to complete the reconstruction of its devastated city center by the end of the year.

“People started coming back. When they saw that the reconstruction was going on, people started to actively come back,” Khusnullin told RIA.

When Moscow fully captured the city in May, about 100,000 people remained out of a pre-war population of 450,000. Many were trapped without food, water, heat or electricity. The relentless shelling left rows upon rows of broken or hollowed out buildings.

The fate of Mariupol first became apparent with a Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital on March 9 last year, less than two weeks after Russian troops entered Ukraine. A week later, around 300 people were reportedly killed in the bombing of a theater that served as the city’s largest bomb shelter. Evidence obtained by the AP last spring suggested the true death toll may be closer to 600.

A small group of Ukrainian fighters held out for 83 days in the vast steelworks of Azovstal in eastern Mariupol before surrendering, their dogged defense pinning down Russian forces and symbolizing Ukrainian tenacity in the face of Moscow’s aggression .

Russia annexed Crimea to Ukraine in 2014, a move that most countries around the world have denounced as illegal, and decided last September to formally claim four regions in southern and eastern Ukraine as Russian territory, following referendums that Kiev and the West have called a sham.

The ICC on Friday accused Putin of being personally responsible for child abductions in Ukraine. UN investigators also said there was evidence of the forcible transfer of “hundreds” of Ukrainian children to Russia. According to Ukrainian government figures, more than 16,000 children have been deported to territories controlled by Russia or Russia itself, many of them from Mariupol.