Azovstal siege ends as hundreds of Ukrainian fighters surrender

Dozens of Ukrainian fighters, some apparently unwounded, surrendered on Tuesday after weeks of being 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 pummeled Mariupol, a major city 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.

The Azov Regiment was formed in 2014 as an extreme right-wing volunteer militia to fight Russian-backed separatists who had taken control of parts of the Donbas - the largely Russian-speaking industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine where Russia says it wants to end Ukrainian rule.

The regiment denies being fascist, racist or neo-Nazi, and Ukraine says it has been reformed away from its radical nationalist origins to be integrated into the National Guard. Ukraine’s military command cast all the defenders as “heroes of our time.”

Kyiv also denies that Russian speakers have been persecuted in Ukraine, and says the allegation that it has a fascist agenda, repeated daily on Russian media, is a baseless pretext for a Russian war of aggression.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that President Vladimir Putin had guaranteed that the fighters who surrendered would be treated “in accordance with international standards.”

Zelenskyy said in his address that “the work of bringing the boys home continues, and this work needs delicacy - and time.”

But Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, said: “Nazi criminals should not be exchanged.”

Lawmaker Leonid Slutsky, one of Russia’s negotiators in talks with Ukraine, called the evacuated combatants “animals in human form” and said they should receive the death penalty.

“They do not deserve to live after the monstrous crimes against humanity that they have committed and that are committed continuously against our prisoners,” he said.

Russia’s Prosecutor General’s office asked the Supreme Court to recognize the Azov Regiment as a “terrorist organization,” Interfax news agency reported on Tuesday, citing the Ministry of Justice website.