Tom Mutch’s ‘The Dogs of Mariupol’

First published in William Dowell's Substack column A Different Place.

In better days, Mariupol ranked as Ukraine’s tenth-largest city. It was known as a bustling hub for manufacturing and played a significant role in the development of Ukraine’s higher education. Situated on the northern coast of the Azov Sea, which opens into the Black Sea, Mariupol was also a favorite destination for summer holidays.

Not anymore.

Before the Russian invasion in 2022, Mariupol’s population was around 425,000 people. After the Russian military finished with it, most of the city’s buildings had been reduced to rubble, and only 125,000 residents remained. Nearly three-fourths of its original inhabitants had either fled, died in the merciless bombardment, or been taken prisoner by the invading army.

The occupiers immediately renamed the city to Zhdanov in honor of Joseph Stalin’s head of propaganda, Andrei Zhdanov. Those familiar with Soviet history recall Zhdanov unleashed a reign of terror on artists and writers, leaving the Soviet culture, for all intents and purposes, brain-dead. The symbolism of the name change could hardly have been lost on Vladimir Putin.

A decision to stay - and witness

Tom Mutch, a contributor to WhoWhatWhy, was in Ukraine when the Russians invaded. He decided to stay and see what happened. His new book, The Dogs of Mariupol, published by Biteback in London and available on Amazon, gives a gripping, on-the-scene account of the devastation that Putin’s “military action” has wrought on the Ukrainians and the Russian soldiers who were sent into what turned out to be a deadly meat grinder, the only purpose of which seemed to be to satisfy Putin’s drive for imperial conquest.

Mutch grew up in New Zealand before studying international relations at Oxford. After graduation, he took a job as a parliamentary researcher for Michael Ashcroft — a former deputy leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and a member of the House of Lords — specializing in defense policy. Mutch made a number of official trips collecting data in Eastern Europe, including a trip to Ukraine in 2018.

When I first heard the title The Dogs of Mariupol, I immediately thought it was a reference to Marc Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Julius Caesar: “Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war.” But Mutch is talking about the real dogs of Mariupol. In the weeks before the invasion, the city’s strays began howling nonstop, recalling an old Slavic folk belief that the dogs sense death’s approach. As Mutch put it, “They are calling out to the spectral hounds that come to collect the souls of the dead.”

A boy and his mother display the shell of a missile that they collected in a small town in the Kharkiv region shortly after its liberation from Russian occupation in September 2022. The Kharkiv counteroffensive was one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in the history of modern warfare.

Tom Mulch

At the time, he noted, Mariupol’s human inhabitants appeared completely oblivious to any threat of a Russian invasion. There were no preparations, and apparently the population was not especially nervous. In his notes, Mutch wondered if the dogs somehow sensed an impending menace that the humans had either missed or repressed.

A few days later, Putin gave a speech declaring that Ukraine had always been an inseparable part of Russia. The next day, the Russians invaded.

By then, Mutch had returned to Kyiv by train. Like Mariupol, Ukraine’s capital was stunned by the attack. But unlike Moscow’s expectations, Kyivans reacted with ingenuity and extraordinary courage.

Why Ukrainians fought - and so many Russians died

How the whole process evolved on a human basis is the subject of Mutch’s book. You had to be there to really understand why the Ukrainians fought with such intelligence and courage, while Russian conscripts died in droves without knowing what they were fighting for.

The Russians, who clearly suffered from overconfidence, had planned to seize Kyiv’s airport and then fly in troops who had been massing across the border in Belarus.

Ukraine had one artillery battery in Kyiv and used it to render Kyiv’s airport unusable. That foiled the Russian invasion timetable: Instead of a quick, surgical strike, Russia was soon bogged down in a humiliating quagmire. The Russian army, which before Putin’s overreach had seemed invulnerable, suddenly looked like a paper tiger led by an incompetent high command.

How the whole process evolved on a human basis is the subject of Mutch’s book. You had to be there to really understand why the Ukrainians fought with such intelligence and courage, while Russian conscripts died in droves without knowing what they were fighting for.

The day-to-day interactions are important, but beyond the individuals involved, the fighting in Ukraine has also had an important impact on modern warfare. For the US, Ukraine has provided a chance to judge the effectiveness of American military hardware on the battlefield, at no cost in American lives.

The Ukrainians: An ingenuity and toughness in battle

Much of the equipment initially sent to Ukraine was outdated and slated to be abandoned on the scrap heap. As the Ukrainians showed their ingenuity and toughness in combat, Americans and Western European allies began providing more sophisticated hardware, while Putin turned to his gulags to man the Russian lines with amnestied criminals. Then, with Russian casualties mounting, he began hiring North Koreans as mercenaries, courtesy of his fellow dictator Kim Jong Un.

In the prologue to his book, Mutch refers to the film Hotel Rwanda, in which Joaquin Phoenix, playing a cynical journalist, observes that the genocide he’s documenting will provoke people around the world to exclaim, “Oh my God, that’s horrible!” before they go on eating their dinner. That has been the recurrent pattern in the Trump administration’s response to what is happening in Ukraine.

Putin rains death and destruction on civilians, including women and children, on a daily basis, using hypersonic missiles, glide bombs, and attack drones. Yet the current occupant of the White House, who fancies himself a top Nobel Peace Prize candidate, embraces Putin in Alaska and invites him for an intimate chat in the presidential limousine.

A war changed by drones

The most recent and potentially crucial change taking place on the battlefield, however, is the use of increasingly sophisticated drones. These cost only a few hundred dollars to produce, yet can easily take out the latest fully equipped tank, which might cost $20–30 million.

Drones are currently responsible for 70 percent of the casualties on both sides. More ominously, the drones used by both sides can be directed to assassinate individuals, and with the advent of AI, the decision to kill may increasingly be delegated to an algorithm in place of human judgment.

Given what’s at stake, directly and indirectly, in this brutal conflict, Tom Mutch’s book provides vivid insights into an unbowed people and rapid developments in contemporary warfare that it would be perilous to ignore.

Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.