Russia parades second British fighter captured in Mariupol
A HOSTAGE video of a second British national captured by the Russians in Mariupol emerged online yesterday.
Sean Pinner, a former Royal Anglian Regiment soldier, looked visibly tired and appeared to be reading from a page or a teleprompter as he said he had been serving along Ukrainian marines.
The 24-second video, posted by a journalist for Russian state TV, ends with Mr Pinner saying he has been captured and is now in Donetsk, the Ukrainian separatists’ stronghold.
Earlier this week, Russia released a similar video from Aiden Aslin, a fellow British hostage and marine.
It came as Kyiv said peace talks would be finished if Russia killed the last of the Ukrainian troops trapped in the besieged port of Mariupol.
“The elimination of our troops, of our men (in Mariupol) will put an end to any negotiations,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday in an interview with the Ukrainska Pravda news website. “That will be an impasse as we don’t negotiate neither our territories nor our people.”
Russian troops yesterday pressed recent advances, hoping to seize their first big prize of the war.
Mariupol has been among the hardest hit after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24. Capture of the port would allow Russia to connect by land the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and the Moscow-backed separatist statelets in Ukraine’s east.
The port was encircled by Russian troops soon after the invasion, but the outmanned and outgunned Ukrainian military have held on.
Civilians have borne the brunt of the battle, cowering in basements with no utilities for weeks.
Russian troops have gradually advanced into the city, but groups of Ukrainian forces are continuing to hold out from inside the city’s giant metallurgical and heavy machinery plants, which both have a vast network of underground tunnels.
Reuters journalists in Russian-held parts of the city yesterday reached the Ilyich steelworks, which Moscow claimed to have captured on Friday.
The Russian defence ministry yesterday said it had cleared the entire urban area of Mariupol of Ukrainian forces and had blockaded a few fighters in the Azovstal steelworks.