Ukraine ordered soldiers defending the last pocket of Mariupol to stop fighting, effectively ceding control of the southeastern port city to Russia after a bloody monthslong struggle that came to signify the brutality of the Kremlin’s war and fortitude of Kyiv’s resistance.

Ukraine said its focus was now on evacuating the troops from the Azovstal steel plant, where they have been holed up under fire. The decision represents an important but costly victory for Moscow as its military offensive struggles and its geopolitical position is weakened further by Sweden and Finland’s bids to join NATO.

Once home to 400,000 people, Mariupol is just 30 miles from the Russian border and was an early target for the invasion. But Ukrainian troops held out, and much of the strategic city now lies in ruins after relentless Russian bombardment and a siege that Kyiv says has killed tens of thousands of people.

Russian forces had encircled the hulking Azovstal steelworks, where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers had defied an ultimatum to surrender and mounted a last-ditch defense for more than two months that held up Russia’s eastern offensive.

Phylicia Dove fails to fight back tears as she talks about the massacre that shattered her community’s haven in Buffalo’s Masten Park neighborhood.

“Tops market was a place of community, a safe space for us to meet, to talk, to be together,” she told CNN. “There’s no one here who hasn’t visited this Tops. It was ours. Even if it wasn’t the best, it was ours, and now our safe space has been infiltrated and taken from us and that is something we are mourning.”

The beloved Tops is the only supermarket in a one-mile radius within this largely Black neighborhood and one that took more than a decade to get. It has now been scarred by a deadly rampage whose remnants are evident in the stretches of police tape that now guard the store.

But the real guardians of this grocery store are the hundreds of residents who have swarmed Jefferson Avenue, mourning, praying and beginning their heartbreaking journey toward healing.