SOS for Mariupol’s wounded

Ukrainian fighters who have been holed up in Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant for weeks issued a desperate plea for help, calling on the international community to evacuate those injured in the near-constant shelling.

Defenders from the Azov Regiment, a nationalist militia that is part of Ukraine’s national guard, said on Telegram Wednesday that the plant had been the target of 38 airstrikes in 24 hours.

The plant’s defenders also said Russian troops continued to try to take the sprawling plant by force Wednesday.

The post came a day after the regiment shared photos of injured fighters, some with missing arms or legs, as they await help in the besieged city.

“The whole civilized world must see the conditions in which the wounded, crippled defenders of Mariupol are and act!” the regiment wrote in a post, adding that conditions at the plant are “completely unsanitary.”

Some of the fighters are suffering from “open wounds dressed with non-sterile remnants of bandages, without necessary medication and even food,” they said.

“We call on the UN and the Red Cross to show their humanity and reaffirm the basic principles on which they were created by rescuing wounded people who are no longer combatants.”

Ukrainian human-rights ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova agreed, calling on the UN and the International Red Cross to help broker an evacuation of the wounded fighters.

“The aggressor does not give the wounded military a chance to survive,” Denisova wrote on Telegram. “Due to the risk of infection because of a lack of antibiotics, medical instruments and sterile dressings, doctors are forced to amputate the limbs (of the wounded) even with minor injuries.”

Plea to popes, too

The wives of two Azov Regiment fighters left in Azovstal made a plea to Pope Francis in Vatican City.

“You are our last hope, I hope you can save their lives, please don’t let them die,” Kateryna Prokopenko, 27, told the pope.

Prokopenko and Yuliya Fedosiuk, 29, met with Pope Francis after his regular general audience in St. Peter’s Square.

They asked him to intervene directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate the removal of Mariupol’s defenders to a neutral nation.