Jayson Geroux looks at the map of Mariupol on the 41st day of the war - and is surprised.

"There are these fingers sticking out into the city, it's weird," says the Canadian major, a proven urban warfare expert.

“Normally you would lock down the city, concentrate your firepower on one side, and methodically work your way from there.

But the Russians are approaching from all possible directions.” This is how the “fingers” are made.

They extend to the town hall in the north and to the theater in the west.

"It's dangerous because those fingers could be cut off by the Ukrainians." And that's not the only observation that irritates the Canadian, who has been training soldiers in urban warfare for many years.

Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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Since the beginning of March, Russian troops have been besieging, shelling and bombing Mariupol, the port city on the Azov Sea.

The destruction is massive.

Ninety percent of the infrastructure had been destroyed, forty percent of it irrevocably, Mayor Vadym Boychenko said earlier this week.

About 130,000 people are still trapped, three times as many lived in the city before the war.

More than 5,000 civilians are said to have been killed during the attacks.

Like Bucha, Mariupol has become a symbol of a war in which Russia abides by no rules and disregards international humanitarian law every day.

“That would tie up far too much energy”

And yet the Russian troops have not yet managed to capture the city.

They advanced, on March 24th they took the town hall.

But any claims that the city was "liberated" were premature.

A video allegedly showing 267 Ukrainian marines surrendering was easily identified as fake.

How things are really happening in Mariupol is difficult to assess from the outside.

We asked two experts for their assessment: How are the Russians doing so far?

And what does it mean to fight in such a city?

They make a harsh judgment about the Russian attackers, from a purely military point of view.

"This is the most unprofessional use of force imaginable," says Jayson Geroux, the Canadian.

"It completely contradicts our principles of military warfare," says Michael Matz, brigadier general and commander of the Bundeswehr Infantry School in Hammelburg, where soldiers are trained for urban and urban warfare.

It is true that NATO countries would first enclose a city before entering it with their own troops.

However, the principle of proportionality applies: It is about using weapons in a targeted manner and achieving the greatest effect with few resources.

That requires careful planning.

"In a big city like Mariupol, it's impossible to conquer and hold every house - that would tie up too many forces," says Matz.

The Bundeswehr calculates it like this: it takes ten soldiers to take over a single-family home, and around thirty to take over a larger building.

With the apartment blocks in Mariupol you could easily have a whole company, a hundred men - for one block.

In open terrain, the rule of thumb is: three attackers to one defender.

In an urban environment, "the attacker should be seven to ten times stronger than the defender," says Matz.

"The defender has a big advantage: he knows his city, the infrastructure, the inner workings of the houses, the subway shafts and sewers." This enables him to strike surprisingly again and again.

Even the volunteers

According to Western ideas, the attacker must therefore set priorities and clarify his targets in detail before he penetrates a city.

Which facilities should be controlled, where are the strategic points?

"I doubt that the Russian troops did that," says Matz.

"Instead, they shoot and bombard residential areas senseless, without regard to losses." Geroux sees this as an expression of a fundamentally different doctrine: "In NATO, artillery supports the maneuvering units, i.e. tanks, engineers, infantrymen.

With the Russians it's the other way around, as these forces support the artillery.” Their combat units are designed for overwhelming firepower, each tactical battalion group not only has many more mortars and howitzers than Western forces, but also multiple rocket launchers.