Ukraine's southern port city of Mariupol was home to over 430,000 people before Russia's February 24 invasion of the eastern European country.
The city has historically been a major trading and industrial hub — a center for metallurgy, engineering, steel production, and iron production.
However, during Russian President Vladimir Putin's ongoing war, Mariupol became the center of a devastating assault by Russian troops who wanted to capture the strategic city to build a land corridor from occupied Crimea to the eastern Donbas region.
During the months-long siege, Russian forces leveled the city with indiscriminate bombardment — targeting a school, maternity hospital, theater, and other civilian structures. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in April that tens of thousands of Ukrainians were likely killed in attacks on Mariupol.
The city has since become a symbolic beacon of resistance against Russia's invasion — rooted in Ukraine's tooth-and-nail defense of the Azovstal steel plant.
But after the recent evacuation of Ukrainian troops and civilians, Russia claimed to have captured the steel plant Azovstal, and with it, the city of Mariupol.
Photos below show Mariupol before and after the current war, and how in a matter of weeks, a once-strategic industrial port city was reduced to rubble.
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