Fall of Mariupol at hand as fighters leave steel plant
Withdrawal gives Russia an unbroken land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula
Mariupol was on the verge of falling to the Russians yesterday as Ukraine moved to abandon the steel plant where hundreds of fighters had held out for months under relentless bombardment in the last bastion of resistance in the devastated city.
The capture of Mariupol would make it the biggest city to be taken by Moscow’s forces in the war yet.
Gaining full control of Mariupol would give Russia an unbroken land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and deprive Ukraine of a vital port.
It could also free up Russian forces to fight elsewhere in the Donbas, the eastern industrial heartland that the Kremlin is bent on capturing.
And it would give Russia a victory after repeated setbacks on the battle- field and the diplomatic front, beginning with the abortive attempt to storm Kyiv, the capital.
More than 260 Ukrainian fighters — some of them seriously wounded and taken out on stretchers — left the ruins of the Azovstal plant on Tuesday and turned themselves over to the Russian side in a deal negotiated by the warring parties. An additional seven buses carrying an unknown number of Ukrainian soldiers from the plant were seen arriving at a former penal colony yesterday in the town of Olenivka, approximately 88km north of Mariupol.
While Russia called it a surrender, the Ukrainians said the plant’s garrison had successfully completed its mission to tie down Russian forces and was under new orders.
“To save their lives. Ukraine needs them. This is the main thing,” Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said.
The Ukrainians expressed hope that the fighters would be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war. But
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower house of the Russian Parliament, claimed there were “war criminals” among the defenders and they should be tried.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was working to extract its remaining troops from the sprawling steel mill. Officials have not said how many remain inside.
The soldiers who left the plant were searched by Russian troops, loaded onto buses accompanied by Russian military vehicles, and taken to two towns controlled by Moscowbacked separatists. More than 50 of the fighters were seriously wounded, according to both sides.
It was impossible to confirm the total number of fighters brought to Olenivka or their legal status.
Russia’s main federal investigative body said it intends to interrogate the troops to “identify the nationalists” and determine whether they were involved in crimes against civilians. Also, Russia’s top prosecutor asked the country’s Supreme Court to designate
Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, whose members have been holding out at Azovstal, a terrorist organisation.
The Azov Regiment was formed as a paramilitary volunteer group in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang, and the neonazi Social National Assembly group.
It’s members have been described as ultra-nationalists and accused of harbouring neo-nazi and white supremacist ideologies.
Kyiv says the Azov militia was folded into Ukraine’s National Guard — a military wing of the Interior Ministry — and that it has been reformed away from its radical nationalist origins.
Elsewhere across the Donbas, seven civilians were killed in Russian attacks in the Donetsk region, regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko reported. In the Luhansk region, Russian soldiers fired rockets on an evacuation bus carrying 36 civilians, but no one was hurt, Governor Serhii Haidai said.
Zelenskyy said Russian forces
fired missiles at the western Lviv region and the Sumy and Chernihiv regions in the northeast, and carried out airstrikes in the eastern Luhansk region.
Russian officials in Belgorod and Kursk, which border Ukraine, accused Kyiv of shelling villages and civilian infrastructure along the frontier, the latest in a series of similar accusations in recent weeks.
In other developments, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, said he sent a team of 42 investigators and forensic experts to Ukraine to look into suspected war crimes. Ukraine has accused Russian forces of torturing and killing civilians.
The World Health Organisation has verified 226 attacks on health facilities in Ukraine — almost three per day on average — since the Russian invasion began, according to the agency’s Europe director, Hans Kluge.
The targeted strikes have killed at least 75 people and wounded 59, he said. —AP