ROME –
Two Ukrainian women whose husbands are defending a besieged steel plant in the southern city of Mariupol are calling for any evacuation of civilians to also include soldiers, saying they fear troops will be tortured and killed if Russian forces leave them behind and capture them.
“Soldiers’ lives also matter. We can’t just talk about civilians,” said Yuliia Fedusiuk, 29, the wife of Arseniy Fedusiuk, a member of the Azov Regiment in Mariupol.
She and Kateryna Prokopenko, whose husband, Denys Prokopenko, is the Azov commander, appealed in Rome on Friday asking for international help to evacuate the Azovstal plant, the last bastion of the Ukrainian resistance in the strategic and now bombed-out port city.
An estimated 2,000 Ukrainian defenders and 1,000 civilians are holed up in the plant’s vast underground network of bunkers, which can withstand air strikes. But conditions there have become more dire, with food, water and medicine in short supply, after Russian forces dropped “bunker busters” and other munitions in recent days.
The United Nations has said that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to organize evacuations from the plant during a meeting this week in Moscow, with the participation of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross. But the discussions, as reported by the UN, concerned civilians, not combatants.
Speaking in English, Prokopenko, 27, called for a Dunkirk-style mission, a reference to the 1940 World War II maritime operation in which hundreds of ships were launched to rescue more than 330,000 encircled British and Allied soldiers. by German forces on the northern beaches. France.
“We can do this extraction operation … that will save our soldiers, our civilians, our children,” he said. “We need to do this right now, because people, every hour, every second, are dying.”
The women said that 600 of the soldiers are wounded and some suffer from gangrene. Video and images shared with The Associated Press showed injured men with stained bandages that needed to be changed; others had open wounds or amputated limbs.
The women said the images were taken sometime last week. The AP was unable to independently verify the date and location of the images.
The men, who are not identified, say they eat just once a day and share as little as 1.5 liters (50 ounces) of water a day between four. Supplies inside the blocked plant are running low, they say.
A shirtless man spoke in obvious pain as he described his injuries: two broken ribs, a punctured lung and a dislocated arm that was “hanging from the flesh.” Another said he stepped on a mine that was dropped from a helicopter, leaving him with an open fracture in his leg.
A military doctor who appears in the video identified herself as an anesthesiologist treating the wounded at the Azovstal plant. She said that she was working with a small team of doctors “in extremely harsh conditions, under constant bombardment.”
“Our resources are extremely limited. The boys literally die before our eyes because we have no chance to evacuate them. There is no way to treat them properly,” he said.
He called for the evacuation of wounded soldiers, along with trapped civilians. “We only ask, we beg, that at least the slightest chance be given to save the lives of these fighters. They deserve it,” he said.
The Azov Regiment traces its roots to the Azov Battalion, which was formed in 2014 by far-right activists at the start of the conflict in the east between Ukraine and Moscow-backed separatists, and which has drawn criticism for its tactics.
Fedusiuk said that she and Prokopenko were seeking help from Europe, the United States and international organizations to find a diplomatic solution to the Azovstal standoff.
And he said that the troops would never surrender to Russian capture.
“We don’t know of any soldiers from Azov who have come back alive from Russian soldiers, since 2014, so they will be tortured and killed,” Fedusiuk said. “We definitely know that, so it’s not an option for them.”
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Associated Press reporter Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed.
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