Kyiv, Ukraine –
Mariupol seemed on the verge of falling into Russian hands on Tuesday as Ukraine moved to abandon the steel plant, where hundreds of its fighters had endured months of relentless bombing in the last stronghold of resistance in the devastated city.
The conquest of Mariupol will make it the largest city still to be conquered by Moscow’s forces in the war, and will give the Kremlin a much-needed victory, although the landscape has largely been ruined.
More than 260 Ukrainian fighters – some of them badly wounded and taken on stretchers – left the ruins of the Azovstal plant on Monday and surrendered to Russia in an agreement agreed by the warring parties. Ukrainian authorities say they are working to evacuate the remaining soldiers from the sprawling steel plant. They wouldn’t say how many were still there.
While Russia called it capitulation, Ukrainians avoided the word and instead said the plant’s garrison had successfully completed its mission to unite Russian forces and was under new orders.
“To save their lives. Ukraine needs them. This is the most important thing, “said Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexei Reznikov.
Ukrainians have expressed hope that the fighters will be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war. But Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of Russia’s lower house of parliament, said without evidence that there were “war criminals” among the defenders and that they should not be exchanged but tried.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine is still working to withdraw its remaining troops from the sprawling steel plant. Authorities do not say how long they stayed inside.
“The evacuation mission continues, it is being monitored by our military and intelligence,” Zelenski said in his evening video address. “The most influential international mediators are involved.”
The operation to abandon the steel plant and its maze of tunnels and bunkers signaled the beginning of the end of a nearly three-month siege that made Mariupol a global symbol of both challenge and suffering.
The Russian bombing killed more than 20,000 civilians, according to the Ukrainian side, and left the rest of the population – perhaps a quarter of the pre-war population of the southern port city of 430,000 – with little food, water, heat or medicine.
During the siege, Russian forces carried out deadly air strikes on a maternity hospital and a theater where civilians had taken refuge. Nearly 600 people may have been killed in the theater.
Gaining full control of Mariupol will give Russia a permanent land bridge to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and deprive Ukraine of a vital port. It could also free Russian forces to fight elsewhere in Donbass, the eastern industrial heart the Kremlin is willing to take.
And that will give Russia victory after repeated failures on the battlefield and on the diplomatic front, beginning with the failed attempt to storm Kyiv, the capital.
However, Russia’s victory is largely symbolic, said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic research at St Andrews University in Scotland.
“I don’t think there will be a significant difference because the Russians have already withdrawn most of their forces,” O’Brien said. “So maybe this is a symbolic moment, but I don’t think it will matter to the Ukrainian resistance.
Adviser to Ukrainian President Mykhailo Podoliak likened Ukrainian defenders to the vastly superior Spartans who opposed Persian forces in ancient Greece. “83 days of Mariupol’s defense will go down in history as the Thermopylae of the 21st century,” he tweeted.
The soldiers who left the plant were searched by Russian troops loaded into buses, accompanied by Russian military vehicles, and taken to two cities controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. According to both sides, more than 50 of the fighters were seriously injured.
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 rebels’ conquest, Penitentiary № 120 was a high-security facility designed to hold those convicted of serious crimes.
Footage from the Associated Press shows that the convoy was escorted by military vehicles bearing the pro-Kremlin “Z” sign as Soviet flags fluttered from roadside poles. About two dozen Ukrainian fighters were spotted waiting in one of the buses.
Russia’s chief federal investigative body has said it intends to question soldiers to “identify nationalists” and determine whether they are involved in crimes against civilians. In addition, Russia’s chief prosecutor has asked the country’s Supreme Court to name the Ukrainian Azov Regiment, whose members are being held by the Azovstal terrorist organization. The regiment has connections with the far right.
The agreed withdrawal could also save lives on Russia’s side, saving its troops from what would almost certainly be a bloody battle to destroy defenders at the 11-square-kilometer (4-square-mile) plant.
Withdrawal could also work in Moscow’s favor, distracting the world from the suffering in Mariupol.
Russian and Ukrainian officials have said peace talks have been postponed.
Retired French Vice Admiral Michel Ohagaray, a former head of the French Center for Advanced Military Studies, said the fall of Azovstal would be a symbolic boost for Russian President Vladimir Putin rather than a military one, as “Mariupol had in fact already fallen”.
“Now Putin can claim ‘victory’ in Donbass,” Olhagaray said.
But as the “incredible resistance” of Azovstal’s defenders has tied up Russian troops, Ukraine may also say it has taken the lead.
“Both sides will be able to be proud or boast of victory – victories of all kinds,” he said.
Elsewhere in the Donbas, seven civilians were killed Tuesday in Russian attacks in the Donetsk region, regional governor Pavlo Kirilenko said. A Russian air strike ignited a fire at a building materials plant, he said. In the Luhansk region, Russian soldiers fired rockets at an evacuation bus carrying 36 civilians, but no one was injured, Governor Sergei Haidai said.
Zelensky said Russian forces had also fired rockets at the western Lviv region and the Sumy and Chernihiv regions in the northeast and launched air strikes in the eastern Luhansk region. He said Russian “sabotage” was taking place in Ukraine’s border areas.
He said the attacks were “a test of our strength” and “a kind of attempt to compensate the Russian army for a series of failures in the eastern and southern parts of our country.”
Russian authorities in Belgorod and Kursk – two regions bordering Ukraine – have accused Kyiv of shelling villages and civilian infrastructure along the border, the latest in a series of similar allegations in recent weeks.
In other events, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan said he had sent a team of 42 investigators, forensic scientists and support staff to Ukraine to investigate suspected war crimes. Ukraine has accused Russian forces of torturing and killing civilians.
The World Health Organization has confirmed 226 attacks on health facilities in Ukraine – almost three on average a day – since the Russian invasion began, according to the agency’s European director Hans Kluge. The targeted strikes killed at least 75 people and injured 59, he said.
“These attacks are not justified, they are never good and must be investigated,” he said.
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McQuillan and Juras Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Mstislav Chernov and Andrea Rosa in Kharkov, Elena Bekatoros in Odessa and other AP officials around the world contributed.
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