Originally published 2022-04-17.
In April 2022, with Mariupol encircled and much of it in ruins, Ukraine's richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, promised to help rebuild the city. In written answers to Reuters published on 16 April, he called Mariupol "a global tragedy and a global example of heroism" and said it would always be Ukrainian. His steel company owned the city's two giant steelworks, so the pledge was both personal and commercial.
Events overtook the promise. Mariupol fell to Russian forces on 20 May 2022 and has remained under occupation since. This article explains what Akhmetov said, who he is, what happened to the city during the siege, and what became of his assets and his pledge afterwards.
What Akhmetov promised in April 2022
Akhmetov told Reuters that his ambition was to return to a Ukrainian Mariupol and make steel produced there competitive on world markets again. He said his holding company, System Capital Management (SCM), would play a key role in rebuilding the country after the war, and argued that Ukraine would need an international reconstruction effort on the scale of "a Marshall Plan for Ukraine".
He also said he had returned to Ukraine on 23 February, the day before the full-scale invasion, and had been in Mariupol on 16 February. He stressed that he was in daily contact with the managers of the city's Azovstal and Illich steelworks, both run by his mining and metals company Metinvest. Metinvest said it would never operate under Russian occupation.
In the same Reuters piece, Akhmetov looked back to 2014, saying that for his business the war had begun that year, when Russia annexed Crimea and armed separatists seized parts of Donbas, costing him the assets there. Those remarks are sometimes credited to Forbes, but they come from the Reuters answers. Officials quoted in the same report estimated Ukraine's war damage at around $1 trillion.
Who is Rinat Akhmetov?
Akhmetov was born in Donetsk in 1966 into a working-class family. In 2000 he founded SCM, which grew into a group of more than 250 companies employing around 150,000 people. Its main businesses are Metinvest in steel and mining, DTEK in energy, and, until recent years, a large media group. He has also been president of the football club Shakhtar Donetsk since 1996.
His fortune has risen and fallen with Ukraine's fate. According to Forbes figures cited by Reuters, his net worth peaked at about $15.4 billion in 2013 and was around $3.9 billion in April 2022. Forbes separately reported that he lost more than $8 billion in the first two weeks after the invasion, as the value of his industrial assets in the east collapsed. Since 2014 he had not been able to return to Donetsk, where his stadium, property and businesses were left in separatist-held territory.
During the war his companies have been among the largest private donors to Ukraine's military and civilians. In March 2022 he told Forbes that his employees were still being paid and that his businesses had turned their efforts to helping people. He also described residents of Mariupol melting snow for drinking water, and said a six-year-old girl had died of dehydration under rubble, a report that circulated widely at the time and could not be independently confirmed.
Mariupol under siege
Mariupol is a port on the Sea of Azov in Ukraine's Donetsk region and was one of the country's main industrial centres. Before 2022 it was home to roughly 400,000 people. Russia attacked it from the first day of the invasion, 24 February 2022, because it sits on the land corridor between Russian-held Donbas and Crimea. By early March the city was surrounded.
The siege became one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the war. Water, power, heating and phone networks failed. On 9 March an airstrike destroyed a maternity ward and children's hospital. On 16 March the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre, where hundreds of civilians were sheltering and the word "children" had been painted outside in huge letters, was destroyed by a Russian airstrike. Tens of thousands of people escaped in private cars and convoys, but many others were trapped for weeks in basements.
The death toll is still uncertain. The original 2022 reports spoke of around 20,000 deaths. Later estimates vary:
- Ukrainian officials put civilian deaths at no fewer than 25,000 by late 2022.
- Human Rights Watch counted at least 10,284 deaths from graves dug between March 2022 and February 2023, and called this an undercount.
- The UN confirmed far fewer individual cases, but said the true figure was likely thousands higher.
How the siege ended
The last organised Ukrainian resistance was based in the Azovstal steelworks, Akhmetov's own plant, whose Soviet-era tunnels and bunkers sheltered soldiers and civilians. After civilians were evacuated in early May, the defenders were ordered to stop fighting. Hundreds surrendered from 16 May, and the last of them left the plant on 20 May 2022, when Russia declared the city fully captured.
Since then the city has been under Russian occupation. Russian authorities have demolished many damaged apartment blocks, built some new housing, switched schools to the Russian curriculum and reopened the port. Ukraine and its allies regard the city as illegally occupied, and Associated Press reporting described the changes as an effort to erase traces of Ukraine there.
Akhmetov's losses and his case against Russia
Both Azovstal and the Illich steelworks were wrecked in the fighting, and together they had been the core of Metinvest's production; Metinvest said the siege had knocked out more than a third of Ukraine's steelmaking capacity. In June 2022 Akhmetov filed a case against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights, alleging grave violations of his property rights and citing the destruction of Azovstal. Reports put the damages he sought in the range of $17 billion to $20 billion.
He has also directed money to people who defended the city. In 2023 he launched a programme called Heart of Azovstal to support Mariupol's defenders and the families of those killed, starting with $25 million and later raising the total substantially. In July 2022 he announced that SCM would leave the media business, giving up its television licences under Ukraine's new law on limiting the influence of oligarchs.
Can Mariupol be rebuilt by Ukraine?
Akhmetov's pledge assumed that Ukraine would hold or retake the city. That has not happened so far, so his promise to rebuild remains on hold rather than broken or kept. Any Ukrainian reconstruction would depend on the outcome of the war and on huge international funding, which is exactly the kind of Marshall Plan he called for.
What the episode shows is how much one city mattered, economically and symbolically. Mariupol's steelworks once made it a pillar of Ukrainian industry, and its defenders made Azovstal a national symbol. For the people who fled, the question of whether they will ever return home, and to what, is still open.
Sources: Reuters via Business Today, 16 April 2022: Ukraine's richest man vows to rebuild besieged city of Mariupol; Forbes, 10 March 2022; Siege of Mariupol (Wikipedia); Rinat Akhmetov (Wikipedia); JURIST, June 2022: Ukraine's wealthiest man sues Russia.
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