Azovstal siege ends as hundreds of Ukrainian fighters surrender

Dozens of Ukrainian fighters, some apparently unwounded, surrendered on Tuesday after weeks holed up in the bunkers and tunnels below Mariupol’s Azovstal steel works as the most devastating siege of Russia’s war in Ukraine drew to a close.

Russian forces pummelled Mariupol, a major port on the Sea of Azov between Russia and Crimea, with artillery for weeks while some of the fiercest urban warfare of the conflict left much of the city a wasteland.

Civilians and hundreds of Ukrainian fighters, many of them from the Azov Regiment, sought refuge in the Azovstal works, a vast Soviet-era plant founded under Josef Stalin and designed with a maze of bunkers and tunnels to withstand nuclear attack.

Russia’s defence ministry said 265 Ukrainian fighters had surrendered, including 51 who were seriously wounded and would be treated at Novoazovsk in the Russian-backed breakaway Donetsk region.

At least seven buses carrying surrendered Ukrainian fighters left the Azovstal steel works escorted by pro-Russian armed forces on Tuesday, a Reuters witness said.

Ukraine’s military command had said in the early hours of Tuesday that the mission to defend the steel plant was over.

It was unclear what would happen to the fighters who were cast by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as heroic defenders but who Russian lawmakers said were “Nazi criminals”. One said they should be given the death penalty.

Moscow has depicted the Azov Regiment as one of the main perpetrators of the alleged radical anti-Russian nationalism or even Nazism from which it says it needs to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speakers.
-MARIUPOL, Ukraine, 
May 17 (Reuters)