Mariupol

Mariupol, city, southeastern Ukraine. It lies along the estuary of the Kalmius and Kalchik rivers, 6 miles (10 km) from the Sea of Azov.

The city was founded in 1778 as Pavlovsk, on the site of a former Cossack encampment. It was renamed Mariupol in 1779 to honour Maria Fyodorovna, the second wife of Crown Prince Paul. In 1780 the city’s population grew rapidly after a large number of Greeks from the Crimean Peninsula were resettled there. In 1882 it was connected by rail to the Donets Basin and developed as a major port for the region. The city was renamed Zhdanov in 1948 for Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, a recently deceased high-ranking Communist Party functionary who had been born there. The city’s earlier name, Mariupol, was restored in 1989.

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In March 2014 Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea and engineered a separatist uprising in Donetsk. Russian-backed forces, in an effort to connect Russia and occupied Crimea, attacked Mariupol repeatedly through the spring and summer of 2014, but Ukrainian troops eventually prevailed. The city was besieged during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Street fighting was intense, and Russian troops shelled civilian areas indiscriminately. As many as 600 people were killed when the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol was hit by a Russian air strike on March 16, 2022. It was widely known that the building was being used as the city’s main bomb shelter, and the theatre’s set designer had painted the word “CHILDREN” on the pavement outside in massive Cyrillic letters that were visible even in satellite imagery. In May Mariupol finally surrendered to the Russians, after a nearly three-month siege that had reduced the once vibrant port city to ruins. Ukrainian officials estimated that at least 20,000 civilians had been killed in the city and that more than 90 percent of Mariupol’s structures had been damaged or destroyed during the siege.

Modern Mariupol’s exports have included coal, steel, machinery, and grain. It is the base of a fishing fleet, and a dredged channel leads to the open sea. Mariupol has large iron- and steelworks and associated coke-chemical and machine-building works; other industries have included ship repairing, fish canning, and flour milling. The city also has a metallurgical institute. Pop. (2021 est.) 431,859.