Russia said on Wednesday that nearly 1,000 Ukrainian fighters from the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol had surrendered to Russian forces, though their fate remained uncertain, with Ukraine promising their eventual swap in a prisoner exchange amid calls in Moscow to have them tried in court.
The surrender of some of Ukraine’s most die-hard fighters — who held out beneath the sprawling steel factory for weeks under heavy bombardment — in effect ended the longest and most devastating battle of the war so far. It also offered Russia an opportunity to present a victory at a time when some pro-Russian commentators have begun to voice frustration over the army’s miscalculations and slow progress in the war.
The Russian defence ministry said in a statement that 694 members of the Ukrainian army and the Azov battalion, which belongs to the country’s National Guard, had surrendered over the past 24 hours, bringing the overall number of surrendered fighters to 959. There was no immediate comment from the Ukrainian government.
A video published on Wednesday by Zvezda, a Russian defence ministry TV channel, appeared to show Russian soldiers on a road littered with debris checking bags of Ukrainian fighters, some of them visibly wounded.
The ministry did not specify where the latest batch of fighters had been taken. Ukraine’s General Staff said earlier that its soldiers had been transported to two Ukrainian towns that are under Russian control.
The Russian statement also offered no clarity over what will happen next. In particular, the fate of members of the Azov battalion, the Ukrainian group whose far-Right links have offered a veneer of credibility to Russia’s false claims that its army was fighting Nazis in Ukraine, carries a symbolic weight for both sides in the war.
In his February speech announcing the start of the invasion, President Putin said that Russia would “seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated bloody crimes against civilians”.
(New York Times News Service)
