Remember Azovstal. Some phrase like that could soon take the part of “Remember the Alamo” in Ukraine’s heroic war of self-defense against Russia.
Azovstal is a giant steel plant in Mariupol, the city in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces are pounding into submission and, in effect, extinction. In it, a couple of thousand Ukrainian troops, sheltering a smaller number of civilians, are holding out under constant Russian bombing and attacks.
This week, they scorned a Russian ultimatum to capitulate or be destroyed.
Illustration: Yusha
In a video message, one of the defending commanders appealed to world leaders to organize an “extraction procedure” to bring the remaining soldiers and civilians to a safe third country.
Such an evacuation would echo that at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Allies rescued their own forces from the Germans to fight another day, but it is unlikely.
More probably, the defenders at Azovstal would have to decide their fate themselves. Surrender is not an option, they have made that clear. Their chosen end, it appears, is to die for their country in this last redoubt.
Like heroism generally, such brave last stands appeared to belong to the past, legend or even myth. At their best, they are valiant defeats that make eventual victory all the more poignant.
At the Alamo in 1836, the Mexicans besieged and killed the Texans defending the mission, but rage at their atrocities rallied other Texans to defeat the Mexicans the following month. The result was the Republic of Texas.
Something even grander took place in 480 BC, when King Xerxes brought his vast Persian army to the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae to attack and subjugate the Greek city states to its south.
A tiny force centered around 300 Spartans held the gap for three days until they were betrayed and outflanked. All died, but they had slowed down the Persian assault. The following year, the Greeks won the war.
Of course, when warriors give their lives they must always fear that their sacrifice could be in vain. That uncertainty gives a last stand a more exalted and even poetic meaning. It becomes defiance for its own sake.
So it did in the year 74, when a group of Jewish zealots held out at Masada, a hilltop fortress by the Dead Sea, against an overwhelming Roman force. According to a Roman historian, the 960 men, women and children committed suicide rather than surrender.
In 1877, a samurai army, in effect, did the same thing. In the Satsuma Rebellion, it rose against the imperial government of Japan and the Westernization it represented. With their ancient skills of war confronting the mechanized weapons of the new industrial era, the samurai stood no chance.
“What happened to the warriors at Thermopylae?” the rebel commander asks his US friend on the battlefield in the movie version. “Dead to the last man,” replies the American, before they throw themselves exultantly at the enemy and into death.
Sometimes the only motivation for a last stand is loyalty to one’s brothers-in-arms. The Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs), a Germanic epic poem, culminates in a slaughter of Burgundian knights by the Huns who are their hosts. Not self-defense, but murder, revenge and betrayal had led them to this point, but together they fought and died.
When the Germans in World War II needed a narrative for their defeat in Stalingrad, they reached for that story.
Hermann Goering, one of Adolph Hitler’s top Nazis, likened the demise of the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army to the death throes of the Nibelungs, while propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels tried to turn Stalingrad into a new legend, where Germans fought “to the last bullet” and “died so that Germany may live.”
All of this was lies. The Third Reich did not live, and the Germans did not fight to the last bullet. Unlike the ancient Spartans, they did not perish because they voluntarily took a last stand in self-defense of their country, but because their evil regime sacrificed them in a war of extermination and enslavement.
If Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propagandists had their choice, they would paint the Ukrainian defenders at Azovstal with the same brush. The Kremlin peddles the fiction that it must attack Ukraine to “denazify” it.
This claim is absurd — Ukraine is a pro-Western democracy with a president of Jewish descent.
However, to Russian ears, the narrative might superficially match some of the Ukrainian defenders in the steel factory, who include the Azov Battalion, a nationalist regiment with alleged neo-Nazi ties.
So the nobility of a last stand is inevitably at least in part in the eye of the beholder, and yet, Azovstal does resemble Thermopylae.
Each was, or is, strategic: Thermopylae was the gate to invade Greece; Mariupol is a land bridge that could connect Russian-held Crimea with the Donbas region the Russians are now trying to swallow.
No matter the particular circumstances, for those of us in more humdrum life situations, last stands remain mysterious. What motivates men and women to face such overwhelming force and near-certain death?
It might be that they are heeding a primal instinct to fight injustice — even if it only means making the enemy pay the highest possible price. If they sell their lives dearly now, their instincts might whisper that future attackers will think twice about coming after their kin.
The Ukrainians at Azovstal are fighting for one another, for their country and for history. Maybe, like the rebel samurai and so many others before, they are also fighting just because the whims of fate placed them in a particular place at a particular time, and they heard the call to take their last stand.
If they perish, it will be on their own terms, and with honor.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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