Several officers of the Azov battalion were transferred to Lefortovo prison in Moscow
“Currently, several people among the Azov commanders who were captured during the attack on Mariupol have been taken to Lefortovo,” a source among the Russian police forces told the news agency, without giving details of who exactly he was talking about.
Lefortovo Prison in Moscow District is known for being the site where the NKVD, the ancestor of the KGB, used torture to interrogate in the 1930s during the USSR era.
Earlier in the day, this Russian source also claimed that the regiment’s deputy commander, Svyatoslav Palamar, and the commander of the 36th Marine Rifle Brigade, Serhiv Volynsky, had been transferred to Russian Federation territory for investigative purposes.
In late May, the leader of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” Denis Pushilin said the soldiers would be brought before the courts of this self-proclaimed pro-Russian separatist state and arrested there. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Roudenko then confirmed that the prisoners would be tried.
Since then, more than a thousand Ukrainian soldiers who went to Azovstal have been transferred to Russian territory for investigative purposes, according to TASS. The Russian Defense Ministry had claimed that by the end of May more than 2,400 Ukrainian troops – including Azov militants – had surrendered.
Ukrainian soldiers in the basements of the Azovstal Steel Plant during weeks of fighting against Russian forces in Mariupol, May 2022. DMYTRO KOZATSKY / AP