KYIV, Ukraine – Ukrainian fighters extracted from the last stronghold of resistance in Mariupol have been taken to a former penal colony in enemy-controlled territory, and a senior military official hoped they could be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war . But a Moscow lawmaker said they should be brought to “justice”.
Russia’s parliament planned to pass a resolution on Wednesday to prevent the exchange of fighters from the Azov regiment, which held out for months inside the Azovstal steel plant as Mariupol was under siege, according to news agencies. Russians.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said negotiations for the release of the fighters were ongoing, as were rescue plans for the fighters still inside the sprawling steelworks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “the most influential international mediators are involved” in the plans. Authorities did not say how many people remain inside.
More than 260 Ukrainian fighters – some seriously injured and taken away on stretchers – left the ruins of the Azovstal factory on Monday and surrendered to the Russian side under a deal brokered by the warring parties. Seven more buses carrying an unknown number of Ukrainian soldiers from the factory were seen arriving at a former penal colony in the town of Olenivka, about 88 kilometers (55 miles) north of Mariupol, on Tuesday.
While Russia called it a surrender, the Ukrainians avoided that word and instead said the factory garrison had successfully completed its mission to pin down Russian forces and was under new orders.
“To save their lives. Ukraine needs it. That’s the main thing,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said.
With the fighters gone, Mariupol was on the verge of falling under full Russian control. Its capture would be the largest city taken by Moscow’s forces and give the Kremlin a much-needed victory, though the landscape was largely reduced to rubble.
The soldiers who left the factory were searched by Russian troops, loaded onto buses and taken to two towns controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. More than 50 of the fighters were seriously injured, according to both sides.
It was impossible to confirm the total number of fighters brought to Olenivka or their legal status. While Mariupol and Olenivka are officially part of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, Olenivka has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014 and is part of the unrecognized “Donetsk People’s Republic”. Prior to the rebel takeover, Penal Colony No. 120 was a high-security facility designed to hold prisoners convicted of serious crimes.
Footage shot by The Associated Press showed the convoy being escorted by military vehicles bearing the pro-Kremlin “Z” sign, as Soviet flags flew from poles along the road. About two dozen Ukrainian fighters were seen in one of the buses.
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman said the Russian military is also detaining more than 3,000 civilians from Mariupol in another former penal colony near Olenivka. Ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova said most civilians are detained for a month, but those considered “particularly unreliable”, including former soldiers and police, are detained for two months. Among the detainees are about 30 volunteers who delivered humanitarian supplies to Mariupol as it was under siege, she said.
While Ukraine expressed hope the fighters would be freed, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, said without evidence that there were “war criminals” among the defenders and “we must do everything to bring them to justice”.
Russia’s top federal investigative body said it intended to interview troops to “identify nationalists” and determine whether they were involved in crimes against civilians. In addition, Russia’s top prosecutor has asked the country’s Supreme Court to designate the Ukrainian Azov regiment as a terrorist organization. The regiment has links with the extreme right.
The operation to abandon the steelworks and its maze of tunnels and bunkers marked the beginning of the end of a nearly three-month siege that has made Mariupol a global symbol of both defiance and suffering.
The Russian bombardment killed more than 20,000 civilians, Ukraine says, and left the remaining residents – perhaps a quarter of the southern port city’s pre-war population of 430,000 – with little food , water, heating or medicine.
During the siege, Russian forces launched deadly airstrikes on a maternity hospital and a theater where civilians had taken refuge. Nearly 600 people were reportedly killed at the theatre.
Taking 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 Donbass, the eastern industrial heartland the Kremlin is determined to capture.
And that would give Russia a victory after repeated setbacks on the battlefield and on the diplomatic front, beginning with the failed attempt to storm the capital, Kyiv.
The Russian victory, however, is more a symbolic boost for Russian President Vladimir Putin than a military victory, said retired French Vice Admiral Michel Olhagaray, former director of the French Center for Advanced Military Studies. He said: “in fact, Mariupol had already fallen.”
“Now Putin can claim a ‘victory’ in Donbass,” Olhagaray said.
But because the “incredible resistance” of the Azovstal defenders pinned down Russian troops, Ukraine can also claim to have come out on top.
“Both sides will be able to be proud or boast of a victory – victories of different kinds,” he said.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak compared the Ukrainian defenders to the vastly outnumbered Spartans who resisted Persian forces in ancient Greece. “83 days of defense of Mariupol will go down in history as Thermopylae of the 21st century,” he tweeted.
Russian and Ukrainian officials have said peace talks are on hold.
Elsewhere in Donbass, eight civilians were killed on Tuesday in Russian attacks on 45 settlements in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff said.
Zelenskyy said Russian forces also fired missiles at the western Lviv region and the Sumy and Chernihiv regions in the northeast. He said that the border regions of Ukraine were the scene of Russian “sabotage activities”.
He said the assaults were “a test of our strength” and “a kind of attempt to compensate the Russian military for a series of failures in the east and south of our country”.
Ukrainian guerrilla fighters also killed several high-ranking Russian officers in the southern town of Melitopol, the regional administration said on Telegram. Russian forces have occupied the city since the start of the war.
The report could not immediately be confirmed. Throughout the war, Ukraine claimed to have killed many Russian generals and other officers. A few of the deaths have been confirmed by Russia.
Russian officials in Belgorod and Kursk – two regions bordering Ukraine – have accused Kyiv of bombing villages and civilian infrastructure along the border, the latest in a string of similar accusations over the past few months. weeks.
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McQuillan and Yuras Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Mstyslav Chernov and Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Elena Becatoros in Odessa and other AP staff around the world contributed.
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