A tram glides pasts cyclists and pedestrians making their way along green and pleasant streets. A submerged diver swims in clear waters by an underwater research centre while families enjoy a picnic at the nearby beach, gazing over at the yachts in the distance as they enjoy the afternoon sun.
It is a vision of a thoroughly modern coastal city, but two strangely familiar images in the bundle of architectural drawings hint at the identity of this place and its dark and troubling recent past: there is the “Memory Centre Dram”, an amphitheatre overlooked by a towering steel and glass structure in the shape of what was Mariupol’s elegant drama theatre, and then, on the following page, an industrial works given over to nature, now described as the Azovstal memorial park.
In the first location, it is estimated that more than 600 men, women and children seeking shelter from the bombs and carnage died in a Russian air attack on 16 March last year. The latter, once the site of one of Europe’s largest metal-producing plants, was where wounded and emaciated Ukrainian soldiers and more than 1,000 civilians resisted a grotesque onslaught of fire and fury for more than 80 days in a desperate last redoubt.
The two sketches feature in a presentation put together by four architectural firms for what is being called Mariupol Reborn, an initiative led by Vadym Boichenko, the mayor of the city since 2015, who lives in exile in Dnipro, 200 miles to the north.
An estimated 22,000 civilians died in Mariupol after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February and 90% of the city’s infrastructure was damaged in the fighting for its future. Half of all the apartment blocks were destroyed, as well as 69 schools or colleges and 15 medical institutions, including, infamously, maternity hospital number three, where four people were killed in a strike on 9 March. A city of half a million people is today down to 120,000.
The Kremlin, now in control, claims Russia is rebuilding. A video was produced of Vladimir Putin allegedly visiting new apartment blocks in Mariupol’s suburbs in March. The claims were rather undermined by Putin’s peculiar appearance – he allegedly employs doubles – and a voice that could be heard in the background. “All this isn’t true,” an unidentified woman shouted. “It’s all for show.”
Boichenko says maybe 1% of what was destroyed has been rebuilt by the Kremlin, and then only to sate the Russian TV audience. Mariupol Reborn, with funding from Rinat Akhmetov, one of Ukraine’s richest business leaders, and organisations such as USAid and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, has, he says, a genuine vision to build a new city on the ashes of the old, albeit smaller than it was. It will accommodate between 200,000 to 250,000 people initially, with the city’s capacity to be increased over the years should people choose to return. The expectation is that Mariupol will be home to 350,000 in time.
The plans, which will be formally unveiled and discussed at a two-day conference in Lviv, in western Ukraine, starting on 28 June, are ambitious and will require billions of dollars – an estimated $14.5bn over 15 years – to put into action. Representatives from the Polish cities of Warsaw, Wrocław and Gdansk, who have their own stories to tell of rebuilding from ruin, will offer their views in Lviv before the drafting of a final master plan. But are these blueprints not just the fruits of wishful thinking? Konstantin Ivashchenko, a former pro-Russia opponent of Boichenko’s on the Mariupol council, has been appointed as mayor by the Kremlin. While Russia does not have control over much of the region, Putin has declared the Donetsk oblast, in which Mariupol is located, to be permanently part of the Russian Federation.
Boichenko, buoyed up by private briefings about Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive in the east and south of the country, says the planning must start now and there is no time to waste. The last time he saw his city was when he left on 26 February having been ordered out, he says, by the regional administration who had become aware of Russian headhunters roaming the streets. He expects to be back in Mariupol by the end of the year.
“The Ukrainian armed forces are already close to the city of Volnovakha,” he says. “Mariupol is 60km away. This is an important transport hub. In world war two, the Soviets also liberated Mariupol through Volnovakha. We believe in the armed forces of Ukraine. And we are confident that we will return to Mariupol this year.”
The fundamentals of Mariupol’s future have been drawn from a consultation exercise that sought to discover the views of the city’s émigrés from their places of refuge in 16 cities across Ukraine. The message was that Mariupol should remember “but not be a cemetery”, Boichenko said. The places where mass graves are sited will be marked, and memorial paving stones built into the streets. A new Museum 86 – in reference to the 86 days of resistance against Russian attempts at occupation – will be established. The former drama theatre will not be rebuilt but a memorial inspired by the 9/11 museum found today at the site of the twin towers in New York, where the absence of the fallen buildings is the focus, will be constructed. Flora and fauna will be allowed to take over some of the wreckage of the Azovstal steelworks, sitting alongside a new children’s play park. Russia’s influence and impact on Mariupol will not be allowed to dominate, Boichenko says. Mariupol’s history will not begin in the public consciousness with Grigory Potemkin, the governor general in the 18th century of Russia’s southern provinces, but instead centuries earlier when Cossack settlers first made their mark, he says.
“We have asked Mariupol residents [around the country] what we need to remove from the city and what to leave,” Boichenko says. “That’s when the idea came up that we should remove everything Soviet from the city. This is the anchor that pulls us back and Putin is clinging to it. The people of Mariupol said that we need to build something new but preserve the history. Then the next question arose: what is the history of Mariupol and who founded it? And we can no longer mention Potemkin and Russia and Mariupol. We asked the Institute of Ukrainian Memory when Mariupol was founded and they gave us the date – 1594.”
This last year of horrors will not define Mariupol, Boychenko says. The city is rethinking its past as it looks to the future.
