My father-in-law was at Stalingrad in 1942. He was an 18 year old draftee. He left a leg there. He was the only one of his unit not killed or frozen to death. He was a farmer, and the rest of his unit were city boys, not used to working outside in the cold, and certainly not THAT cold. Some soldiers from another unit near his position noticed "hey, this guy is still alive!" and took what was left of him along. He gradually recovered to the extent possible, though his farming days were, of course, done. Since he was not a Party member, nor connected to one, he was just sent back to his village as discarded collateral damage. While fighting his leg's gangrene infection, some of his time was in a Ukrainian field hospital, and to his death, he retained fond memories of the people there.
While Mariupol is a story in and of itself, and the city--as so many before it--has been flattened, as someone who heard from a first hand witness about Stalingrad, I can't say that I see many parallels.
As for present-day Russians, a good friend of ours has a girlfriend still in Russia. He hasn't been able to get in, and she hasn't been able to get out for over two years now. They speak on the phone three times a week, and they have to be careful what they say (she speaks only Russian). He says it is clear that average Russians these days get ONLY the information that the government wants them to get. They have very little idea of what is really going on unless they speak directly with someone recently returned from the battlefield, and the Russian military does its best to hinder such contact. The media, does its Fox-like twisting of reality such as Putin desires, and it is apparently dangerous to even voice out loud an opinion that goes contrary to what they were fed on last night's "news."
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