Starved into Submission: Siege Doctrine from Syria to Mariupol (Part 2)

[Rebecca Bakos Blumenthal is Starvation and Humanitarian Crisis Lead at Global Rights Compliance.

Elise Lauriot Prevost is a legal advisor with Global Rights Compliance.]

Siege Tactics in Syria

This article traces Russia’s use of siege warfare and the deliberate starvation of civilians, field-tested across the Syrian conflict and then deployed against Mariupol. Part II examines the siege of Yarmouk camp, now the subject of pending criminal proceedings in Germany and Sweden, before analysing the 85-day siege of Mariupol as the direct application of the siege and starvation doctrine. It closes with the structural impunity that has enabled this pattern to repeat.

Similar tactics were also deployed in Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp located in the south of Damascus, with particularly dire consequences for the civilian population trapped within the enclave. By 2013, the Syrian government had imposed a siege cutting off access to food, water, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid. Due to the residential nature of the camp and lack of access to agricultural land, civilians within were heavily reliant on basic staples and foodstuffs from outside the camp. As a result, the complete siege imposed in July 2013 and the concurrent aerial attacks and damage on functioning healthcare infrastructure in the camp, led to a rapid deterioration of the humanitarian situation. Between July 2013 and February 2014, Amnesty International documented 194 civilian deaths, with starvation, lack of adequate medical care, and sniping as the three most frequent causes. While after sustained international pressure and negotiations, UNRWA regained partial access to the camp, with limited and sporadic distribution beginning in January 2014, the modalities of aid distribution were symptomatic of how siege and starvation were deployed as an instrument of control. In fact, aid distribution was heavily controlled by the regime and became increasingly dangerous to access for civilians in desperate need of basic supplies, as reports indicated distribution points were regularly struck by sniper fire and explosive munitions. ISIL captured large parts of Yarmouk camp in April 2015, severing UNRWA’s access. The siege continued until 2018 when a Syrian regime offensive, supported by a Russian aerial campaign, flattened 80% of remaining infrastructure and displaced the remaining civilian population.

The COI defined these tactics as “starvation until submission,” a term that captures the underlying logic: starvation as a weapon of war was not incidental to sieges but their mechanism, designed to break civilian will as a predicate to surrender.

What the experience of the armed conflict in Syria has demonstrated, across more than a decade of documented sieges, was not only that siege and starvation could be practiced as a deliberate method of warfare at scale, but that it could be conducted with near total impunity for those most responsible for authorising and sustaining it. This may yet change. In July 2025, the German Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office issued indictments for five individuals, for their roles in the siege of Yarmouk between 2012 and 2014. One was charged with the war crime of starvation for beating civilians attempting to access humanitarian aid. The charge is narrow, targeting an individual at a distribution point rather than the broader architecture of siege and starvation, but the trial nonetheless represents a first opportunity to examine how the deliberate deprivation of food was operationalised through siege warfare , and a reasoned judgment could establish a precedent for broader prosecutions.

Mariupol — The Doctrine Applied

What Russia helped refine across Syria, it applied in Mariupol, faster, harder, and with heavier firepower. The 85-day siege of Mariupol, from 24 February to 20 May 2022, was not urban combat that incidentally devastated a city of nearly half a million people. It was, as a year-long investigation by GRC concluded, a deliberately calibrated starvation strategy whose contours would be unmistakably familiar to anyone who had followed events unfolding in Syria.

The assault began with critical infrastructure. Within days of the invasion on 24 February, pro-Russian forces struck power lines, blacking out half the city, and within a week had destroyed all 15 electricity entry points into Mariupol. By 2 March, internet connectivity had collapsed to seven per cent of its pre-war level. With power and communications severed, civilians lost heat, light, and any ability to learn where food, water, or safe shelter might be found. Residents drained defunct heating systems and melted snow for drinking water. The last functioning telecommunications tower fell on 6 March. GRC’s investigation found that deliberate attacks on energy and water infrastructure began during the very first week of encirclement.

The assault on critical civilian infrastructure extended well beyond energy. At least 22 supermarkets and food markets were damaged or destroyed over the course of the offensive. Healthcare facilities, themselves arguably qualifying as objects indispensable to survival under IHL, were systematically struck; the attack on the maternity hospital on 2 March prompted one Ukrainian prosecutor to say simply that “the hope left us,” a phrase that became the title of GRC’s report. When desperate civilians improvised alternatives, establishing ad hoc food and water distribution points in large public buildings, those too became targets. On 16 March, Russian Forces struck the Donetsk Drama Theatre and the Neptun Swimming Pool Complex, both serving as shelters and distribution hubs for displaced civilians, and clearly identifiable as non-military sites. Ninety per cent of residential buildings in Mariupol were ultimately damaged or destroyed.

Alongside the physical destruction, Russia weaponised humanitarian access. A ceasefire was announced on 5 March to allow civilian evacuation. Russian forces did not observe it, shelling the announced evacuation routes. Humanitarian corridors were repeatedly declared and repeatedly rendered inaccessible or life-threatening. International aid organisations were denied entry. The Russian Ministry of Defence publicly acknowledged the “humanitarian catastrophe” that had emerged in Mariupol by 4 March, demonstrating full awareness of the civilian situation, while simultaneously doing nothing to alleviate it and continuing to obstruct any external relief. This is the corridor-as-propaganda tactic that had been refined in Syria: the announcement of mercy while the siege continued.

Up to 200,000 civilians fled during the siege, often under fire, with many funnelled through “filtration” checkpoints and centres, compulsory security screenings at which pro-Russian forces registered, interrogated, and in many cases arrested, detained, or forcibly transferred Ukrainians to Russia. Some 350,000 residents were displaced in total. Civilian humanitarian volunteers were arrested and charged with terrorism-related offences. GRC’s investigation found it to be a deliberate component of the starvation strategy, evidence of an overall intent to weaponise hunger.

The military logic of the siege also tracked Syria point for point. Russian forces employed maskirovka (“misinformation”) and blokirovanie (“blocking”), splitting the city into three isolated pockets, the port area, the Illich Iron & Steel Works, and the Azovstal plant, in much the same way they had carved eastern Ghouta into enclaves. Once the first two pockets fell in April, Russian ground forces tightened the perimeter around Azovstal and conducted relentless airstrikes. The Ukrainian armed forces, by then encircled with the civilian population starved into extreme vulnerability, were ordered to surrender on 17 May 2022. The city fell three days later. The siege of Azovstal was never about storming a fortified position; it was about denying survival until capitulation.

In the aggregate, GRC’s investigation, drawing on satellite imagery, analysis of nearly 400 open-source and media reports, and weapons and munitions expertise, found reasonable grounds to believe that pro-Russian forces intentionally used the starvation of civilians in Mariupol as a method of warfare to accelerate the city’s capture and force the capitulation of the Ukrainian military. Mariupol was not destroyed by the fog of war. It was dismantled, systematically and deliberately, in a pattern that closely mirrors what pro-Russian forces had done in Syria a decade earlier, and what they had been permitted, through sustained impunity, to perfect.

Breaking the Cycle of Impunity

The connection between Syria and Mariupol is not merely tactical. It is structural. In Syria, Russia helped sustain and intensify a pattern of siege warfare and starvation tactics employed against civilian populations, while repeatedly using its  Security Council veto to shield the Assad regime from meaningful accountability, then deploying those same tactics against Ukraine. Impunity was not a side effect of Russia’s Syrian intervention. It was, in retrospect, one of its key outputs: the demonstration that siege and starvation could be practiced at scale, documented extensively by UN bodies, and still generate no criminal accountability for those responsible at the highest levels.

That pattern of impunity is worth examining, because it is not accidental. When the UN Security Council attempted to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court, Russia vetoed it. When ceasefire resolutions have been tabled to end sieges in which Russia or its proxies were participants, Russia has vetoed. The veto functions not merely as a procedural tool but as a substantive enabler: it insulates the conduct of war from legal consequence at the international level, while simultaneously providing political cover at the national level. The result is that siege warfare, including the deliberate starvation of civilians, has been practiced against population after population, in Syria, in Ukraine, and beyond, with the reasonable expectation that no one responsible will face prosecution.

This accountability gap is particularly stark when considered against the formal legal architecture that now exists. Starvation as a method of warfare has been a war crime in IACs under the Rome Statute since its entry into force. The 2019 amendment extended that criminalisation to NIACs, closing the most significant jurisdictional gap in the prohibition. The prohibition on starvation is also part of customary international humanitarian law, applicable to all parties regardless of treaty status. The legal tools, in other words, exist. What has been largely absent is the political will and institutional capacity to use them.

The lack of prosecutions in relation to the war crime of starvation illustrates the broader institutional tendency to reach for crimes that are more legible and more readily individualised. Starvation as a war crime remains, in practice, radically under prosecuted relative to its frequency and severity.

There are reasons for cautious optimism. In a historic step forward, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant that include charges for the crime of starvation. The Panel of Experts convened by the ICC Prosecutor specifically concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that starvation in the Gaza Strip had been committed through the siege and closure of borders, restrictions on entry of indispensable objects, cutting off supplies of electricity and water and severe restrictions on food, medicine and fuel supplies.

The proceedings underway in Germany, examining the war crime of starvation in relation to the siege of Yarmouk, are significant not only for their potential outcome, but for the legal work they require: reconstructing the chain of command, establishing requisite intent, and demonstrating that the deprivation of objects indispensable to civilian survival was not a by-product of military operations but their purpose. If successful, they offer a replicable template for future prosecutions, and eventually for Mariupol.

The pattern documented in this article, from Yarmouk to Mariupol, and now visible again in Gaza, makes clear that siege and starvation are not exceptional or aberrational tactics. They are a practised doctrine, employed with deliberate intent, and sustained by the assurance that their perpetrators will not be held to account. Gaza, where independent ICJ proceedings are underway and where the use of food as a weapon has been extensively documented, is the most recent iteration of a cycle that will not end through documentation alone. What is required is prosecution: the consistent application of criminal law to the deliberate starvation of civilians, in every theatre in which it occurs, regardless of the political identity of the perpetrator. Until that bar is reached, the doctrine will travel, and the only question will be where it is applied next.

Photo by Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash