Steelworks defenders may face execution
Prominent MP suggests ‘moratorium on capital punishment’ be lifted to reflect ‘horrendous crimes’
Ukrainian soldiers evacuated from the last stand of the Mariupol steelworks should be executed, Russian MPS and former military commanders said, as they urged Vladimir Putin to tear up plans for a prisoner swap. The siege of Mariupol drew to a close yesterday after more than 200 fighters, many injured, were taken by bus to Russia-controlled towns as part of a negotiated withdrawal. Kyiv hailed the soldiers for having “changed the course of the war” by stalling the Russian advance.
UKRAINIAN soldiers evacuated from the last stand of the Mariupol steelworks should be executed, Russian MPS and former military commanders said, as they urged Vladimir Putin to tear up plans for a prisoner swap.
The siege of Mariupol drew to a close yesterday after more than 200 fighters, many of them injured, were taken by bus to Russia-controlled towns as part of a negotiated withdrawal.
The complete capture of Mariupol is Russia’s biggest victory since its Feb 24 invasion and gives Moscow total control of the Sea of Azov coast and an unbroken stretch of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said President Putin had guaranteed that the fighters who surrendered would be treated “in accordance with international standards”.
The port city now lies in ruins, and Ukraine believes tens of thousands of people were killed under months of Russian bombardment and siege.
Kyiv hailed the soldiers for having “changed the course of the war” by preventing the Russian army from moving further into the country for 83 days.
Hardliners in Russia yesterday called for the death penalty for the soldiers, who have been portrayed as Nazis by the Kremlin to justify the invasion.
“In case their horrendous crimes against humanity are proven, I would like to revive my idea to lift the moratorium on capital punishment in Russia and let the court consider using it,” said Leonid Slutsky, a prominent MP and a member of Russia’s negotiating team with Ukraine.
Igor Girkin, a retired Russian military intelligence officer, who fought in eastern Ukraine in 2014, joined calls to execute the fighters.
He re-posted comments online saying: “Azov is one of the best-trained battalions… whose main goal is to eliminate all Russian and Soviet people. That’s why no one of them can stay alive. Not a single one of them,” it said.
Mr Girkin, a retired colonel, said he agreed with “every word”.
Margarita Simonyan, the head of state-news channel Russia Today, said the Ukrainian troops had been taken to a Russian jail, quoting sources she did not name.
“The ‘successfully evacuated’ Azov fighters are said to have arrived at their new permanent base – the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service,” she wrote on Twitter. “I wish Kyiv that all their evacuations end with just such success.”
Russia’s prosecutor general’s office asked the Supreme Court to recognise the Azov Regiment as a “terrorist organisation”, Interfax news agency reported on Tuesday.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian parliament, called for lawmakers to draft a bill preventing its fighters from being handed over in exchange for captured Russian soldiers. “These are war criminals, and we should do our best to get them to face justice,” he said.
Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar said in a video that “an exchange procedure will take place for their return home”.
But Mr Volodin, speaker of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, said: “Nazi criminals should not be exchanged.”
Dozens more Azovstal defenders were seen leaving the plant yesterday afternoon, with at least seven more buses put on for them by Russian forces.
The battle of Mariupol lasted more than three months, claimed the lives of more than 20,000 civilians, and
destroyed one of the largest cities in the Donbas.
“Because Mariupol drew in the Russian Federation’s forces for 82 days, the operation to seize the east and south (of Ukraine) was held up. It changed the course of the war,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, said yesterday. He said the defence of the Azovstal steel plant would “go down in history as the Thermopylae of the 21st century,” referring to the ancient battle where a tiny force of Greeks fought to the death against a vastly outnumbering Persian army.
To dislodge the last Ukrainian holdouts, the Russians pummelled Azovstal with every kind of ordnance they could bring to bear. Footage of one of the last bombardments over the weekend showed glowing thermite raining down relentlessly on the factory complex.
In the claustrophobic tunnels beneath, the defenders knew they were facing near certain death and said so in several messages in the run-up to the surrender.
Drone footage released by Russian separatists yesterday showed many of the fighters being carried on stretchers out of the ruined steelworks.
On April 21, Mr Putin effectively declared the battle for Mariupol won and told Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, in a staged-for-the-cameras meeting to cancel the “pointless” assault on the last defenders in Azovstal.
A look at the map was enough to show why that was never really an option for Moscow.
The M14 coastal highway linking the Russian city of Rostov with Crimea runs literally under the shadow of Azovstal’s blast furnaces. To really secure a land bridge from the Russian mainland to the territory it seized from Ukraine in 2014, the steelworks had to fall.
Now Mr Putin can finally say he has achieved one of his reduced war aims – but at a very heavy cost.
The defence of Mariupol, as Mr Podolyak suggested, bears comparison to some of the most influential last stands on record.
The war here still hangs in the balance. But if Ukraine can push the Russians back to the border, historians will study how a handful of men and women in the tunnels of Azovstal bought the time for one of the most remarkable military reversals in history.
‘Footage over the weekend showed glowing thermite raining down relentlessly on the factory’