WaPo | Ending one of the most dramatic battles of the Ukraine war, hundreds of Ukrainian fighters, many seriously wounded, gave up their weeks-long defense of a besieged steel plant in the strategic port city of Mariupol on Monday and were taken to Russian-controlled territory, while hundreds more remained trapped in the plant Tuesday as delicate negotiations continued.
“Ukraine needs Ukrainian heroes alive,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address, as the delicate operation took place. “We hope that we will be able to save the lives of our guys. Among them are the seriously wounded. They are being provided with medical aid.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry portrayed the exit of 264 Ukrainian soldiers from the Azovstal steel plant as a surrender and a Russian victory. To Ukrainian officials, the fighters were heroes whose desperate last stand changed the course of the war, by tying up Russian forces for weeks in the battle for Mariupol, preventing them from sweeping across southern Ukraine.
Russia won effective control of Mariupol weeks ago, securing a crucial land bridge from Russia to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula it annexed in 2014. But fate of fighters trapped in tunnels under the steel plant became a desperate symbol of Ukrainians’ will to fight and die for their land, a key factor in Ukraine’s military successes against Russia’s larger, more powerful army.
Mariupol’s Azovstal Iron and Steel Works and its network of underground tunnels served as a shelter and final foothold for hundreds of Ukrainian fighters, including many from the controversial far-right Azov Regiment, as well as trapped civilians.
They were holed up in the facility for weeks under an intense Russian assault, before all women, children and elderly people were evacuated under an agreement earlier this month. Those who made it to safety described a brutal siege in cold and fetid bunkers, where they lived without sunlight as food and water supplies dwindled.
0 comments:
Post a Comment