The resistance ended. Ukraine accepted that it could not retain control of the Azovstal steel mill by military means and gave the green light for the men who tooth and nail defended this industrial complex that became the heart of the coastal city of Mariupol to consider their mission complete. In a first step, 265 men, 51 of them seriously injured, have been evacuated since Monday night in buses identified with the letter Z, as hated in Ukraine as it is praised by many in Russia, where there is talk of surrender.
The destination of these men would have been the areas controlled by Russia in the separatist region of Donetsk, in the east of the country, although their future is unknown. At first, from the Ukrainian government there was talk that they would be part of a future prisoner exchange, but with the passing of the hours the scenario became more complicated.
The names of the people who left yesterday are a secret until now, and the number of combatants who until last night remained in the tunnels of this steel mill, which for months was a refuge not only for the military and defenders of the city, but also for also several hundred civilians, including women and children.
The testimonies of the last evacuees days ago in humanitarian missions led by the UN and the Red Cross speak of how life in those tunnels had been a hell in which it was not known if it was harder to resist the bombings or the living conditions . Many say that they came to drink two sips of water a day and everything they got was thanks to these soldiers who risked their lives to get supplies.
“They had no choice but to surrender. They were never going to let them out alive, but I fear for their future,” Nicola, who works as a commercial promoter, said yesterday. President Vladimir Putin has spoken since the beginning of the invasion that one of the objectives was the “denazification” of Ukraine and aimed against the nationalists against Russia, who for him are represented by the Azov regiment.
This group emerged in the context of the Euromaidan in 2014 associated with extreme nationalist ideas, but in 2017 they were incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard and became part of the special forces. Many of its initial members withdrew and focused their fight on other fields. Experts say that today this force is integrated into the military institution and made up of a diverse number of men. From Russia they are seen as one of their main enemies. The forces defending Mariupol were made up of different groups: marines, members of the Territorial Defense Forces, police, border guards, and members of the National Guard, including fighters from the Azov regiment, among others.
“Ukraine needs living Ukrainian heroes,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his television address on Monday night, giving the green light to end the mission.
The battle for Mariupol was strategic for Russia from the start of the war; its conquest would allow to unite the Crimean peninsula, annexed in 2014, with the separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. Very soon the bombardments intensified and with the days the city began to be destroyed, and the lives of its inhabitants ruined. The testimonies of those who have been able to flee in these months speak of dozens of dead lying in the streets, of indiscriminate attacks and hunger, but also of forced exoduses to Russia. One of them is Ania’s 15-year-old son David, who was in Mariupol when the siege began. She had traveled to join her new husband in Kharkiv, but her son had not been able to accompany her. For weeks, Ania did not hear from David until one day she received a call in which she told him that he was in Russia, that they had taken her documents and given her 10,000 rubles. When we found her, in March, the woman was living a nightmare trying to save him, because the family had no one there. In the end, and through an intermediary, they managed to get him out of the country two weeks ago, but at a very high economic cost.
Natalia is part of a group of women, wives and mothers of fighters trapped in Azovstal who have been meeting for weeks in a parking lot in Zaporizhia, an industrial city in the southeast that has become a reception center for those fleeing Mariupol. They were trying to draw attention to the fate of their men while the world’s attention was focused on civilians.
“He is injured for the second time, they tell me that they eat very little every two days,” her husband had told her two weeks ago. The last time he called her was three days ago to quickly tell her that she was better, but yesterday Natalia said: “We don’t know anything, they haven’t told us anything.”
While the concern of the families continues, the Government yesterday recognized the struggle of these men, which ended up marking the fate of the war. The resistance in this port on the Sea of ??Azov led the Russian forces to focus their efforts on conquering the city. The price was disastrous for Mariupol and its inhabitants, but it helped the fate of Russian offensives in other regions to have a favorable outcome for Ukraine. Yesterday Defense Minister Olexí Réznikov assured that these men had managed to stop the Russian advance towards Zaporizhia or Donetsk. “Thanks to the heroism of the Mariupol garrison, we managed to push back the occupiers from the outskirts of Kyiv,” he said.
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