Fate of evacuees from Mariupol is still unclear
RUSSIA has said that nearly 1,000 Ukrainian troops at a steelworks in the city of Mariupol have surrendered, abandoning their dogged defence of a site that has become a symbol of their country’s resistance.
Ukraine ordered the fighters to save their lives – and said their mission to tie up Russian forces was now complete – but has not called the column of soldiers walking out of the plant a surrender.
The fighters face an uncertain fate, with Ukraine saying they hope for a prisoner swap but Russia vowing to try at least some of them for war crimes. It is not clear how many fighters remain inside the stronghold, Ukraine’s last in the strategic port city which is now largely reduced to rubble.
Both sides are trying to shape the narrative and extract propaganda victories from what has been one of the most important battles of the war. “There can be just one interpretation. The troops holed up at Azovstal are laying down their weapons and surrendering,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday.
Russian defence ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov, also speaking yesterday, said that 959 Ukrainian troops had left the Azovstal plant since they started coming out on Monday.
At one point, officials put the number of fighters holed up in the mill’s sprawling network of tunnels and bunkers at 2,000.
The figures, if confirmed, suggest that Moscow might be within touching distance of being able to claim that all of Mariupol has fallen. That would be a boost for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in a war where many of his plans have gone awry.
But another setback already looms, with Sweden and Finland both officially applying to join Nato yesterday – a move driven by security concerns over the Russian invasion.
Mr Putin launched the invasion on February 24 in what he said was an effort to check Nato’s expansion, but has seen that strategy backfire. Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he welcomed the applications, which now have to be assessed by 30 member countries.
Beyond its symbolic value, gaining full control of Mariupol would also allow Russia to deploy forces elsewhere in the Donbas, the industrial heartland that the Kremlin is now bent on capturing. It would also give Russia an unbroken land bridge to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, while depriving Ukraine of a vital port.
What will now happen to the fighters is not clear. At least some have been taken to a former penal colony in the town of Olenivka, about 55 miles north of Mariupol, in territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Ukraine says it hopes they can be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war and that negotiations are delicate and time-consuming. In Moscow, though, there are mounting calls for Ukrainian troops to be put on trial. Russia’s main federal investigative body said it intends to interrogate the troops to determine whether they were involved in crimes against civilians.
Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, said negotiations for the fighters’ release were ongoing, as were plans to pull out others still inside the steel mill.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said “the most influential international mediators are involved” in the evacuation.