Volodymyr Baranyuk, commander of the 36th Marines, was found dead in Mariupol, according to Eduard Basurin, commander of militias in the proRussian Donetsk Republic. No confirmation from Ukrainian side
FROM OUR SEND
DNIPRO They say no to ultimatums. They fight, hide and attempt missions. Several times the defenders of Mariupol, those Ukrainian soldiers who went down in military legend with their tenacity, courage and organization, sent evidence of their successes: hit Russian tanks, heaped the corpses of enemy soldiers at their feet.
This time, however, it is up to Moscow to announce an important strike on the Mariupol Front. Volodymyr Baranyuk, commander of the 36th Ukrainian Naval Brigade, was shot down. His body was found by proRussian militiamen who took part in the siege along with the regular forces of Moscow and Chechen auxiliaries.
According to the deputy commander of the Donetsk separatist forces Eduard Basurin, the commander was killed about 5 days ago trying to break the siege to leave the city.
On the night of April 11/12, a group of soldiers from the 36th Naval Brigade became separated from the rest of the Ukrainian forces and attempted a sortie outside the Ilyich factory, the other steelworks next to the larger Azovstal, explained Basurin. The escape was prevented by special forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic. During the inspection of the crime scene, the body of the brigade commander, Colonel Baranyuk Vladimir Anatolyevich, his personal belongings and weapons were found. With the commander, 50 other Marines were also killed while 42 surrendered.
It is possible that the commander’s maneuver was a diversionary tactic to allow the rest of his troops to join the Azov Battalion within the Azovstal Steel Complex. The colonel’s death would have occurred on Monday night, while a video surfaced on Wednesday showing Azov commander Denys Prokopenko together with Major Serhiy Volyna as head of the naval department.
The two of them may or may not have known about Colonel Anatolyevich’s victim. In any case, it is significant that the Russian armed forces managed to clear the battlefield only after 5 days. A sign that Azov and what remains of the Marines on the ground can fire enough artillery shells to thwart the advance.
Bottled at Azovstal to hold the Ukrainian Mariupol flag, fewer than 2,000 men are likely left. Many of them are wounded, but apparently many, maybe a thousand, are fit to fight. Russian sources also insist on supporting a large presence of foreign, Canadian and European fighters. As evidence, they show an Englishman allegedly captured alive. But they are unable to review proposals designed to serve Russian propaganda to demonstrate Western complicity in training and arming Ukraine in an antiRussian capacity.
On the other hand, it was impossible not to believe the amount of ammunition and food that Azov had accumulated before the war. What is impressive is the volume of fire that they have developed in these weeks, presumably without ever being replenished.
The same applies to the defenses: grandiose, made of reinforced concrete, resistant to more than 50 days of continuous artillery attacks, more than 100 air raids and a dozen rocket launches a day. However, how long they will last is impossible to know.
Across Ukraine, their resistance became so symbolic that President Zelenskyy dropped the most important burden he was carrying to try to get a safe passage that would save his life. If they are exterminated said the President it will be impossible to sit at the peace table.
Moscow retorts that, in addition to repeated ultimatums to surrender, all of which were immediately rejected by both Azov’s military and Kiev’s political leaders, it cannot do so. Moscow wants Mariupol, and if Azov and what’s left of the Marines prevent him from fighting, they must be eliminated.
Such as? The hypothesis that is gaining ground among military experts, a hypothesis already expressed by the proRussian authorities in Donetsk, is the use of chemical weapons. We will flush them out of their burrows like moles. This siege is already history, already a tragedy. It only runs the risk of becoming even more disgusting.
April 17, 2022 (Change April 17, 2022 | 21:04)
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