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On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry issued an ultimatum to the Ukrainian garrison defending Mariupol.

“Lay down your arms,” Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, the director of the Russian National Center for Defense Management, said in a briefing distributed by the defence ministry.

“A terrible humanitarian catastrophe has developed,” Mizintsev said. “All who lay down their arms are guaranteed safe passage out of Mariupol.”

The deadline is 5 a.m. Monday, Moscow time, or 10 p.m. Sunday Eastern Daylight Time.

With about two hours remaining to the deadline, the defenders of Mariupol rejected the demand. This sets the stage for the largest siege of a city since World War II.

Mariupol has been surrounded since at least March 2.

The defense of Mariupol has seen Russia revert to type. Despite a few hundred thousand civilians being in the city, the Russians have relied upon indiscriminate bombing and shelling, including the “evacuation routes” ostensibly guaranteed by the Russians to be safe to civilians leaving the city.

Over the past week, a more ominous turn of events has occurred. Russian soldiers, presumably part of Rosgvardiya, or the National Guard of Russia (see Top General in Putin’s Personal Army Is Arrested by FSB for details on the National Guard) have been rounding up citizens in Mariupol and deporting them to Russia,

“Over the past week, several thousand Mariupol residents have been taken to Russian territory,” the city said in a statement. “The occupiers illegally took people from the Livoberezhny district and from the shelter in the sports club building, where more than a thousand people (mostly women and children) were hiding from the constant bombing.”

Captured Mariupol residents were taken to camps where Russian forces checked their phones and documents, then redirected some of the residents to remote cities in Russia, the statement said, adding that the “fate of the others is unknown.”

“What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people,” Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said in the statement. “It is hard to imagine that in the 21st century people can be forcibly taken to another country.”

Given the past behavior of the Russian Army and the statements made by its leadership, there is no incentive for anyone to trust the Russians’ guarantee of safe passage. At best, the defenders can hope to end up in some gulag above the Arctic Circle; at worst, they will be executed after a summary court-martial.

This seems to bring us to this part of the battle for the Alamo.

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The key question is if the Russian Army can make the threat stick. Trying to bluster defenders into surrender with death threats isn’t generally a smart way to go. There is nothing yet in the war in Ukraine that indicates that the Russians have the skill, motivation, or ability to deliver on the threat. When they fail through conventional means, I think we can expect to see the Russians to escalate to chemical weapons for the terror effect and because they have taken the measure of the mewling old wretch in the White House.

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