Ukrainian fighters from Mariupol consider leaving under conditions
The last Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol are refusing to surrender but are asking the international community for “security guarantees” while Russian forces aim to capture the entire strategic city in south-eastern Ukraine. “We are ready to leave Mariupol with the help of a third party,” armed with weapons, “to save the people entrusted to us,” Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov battalion, said by telegram this morning.
Several hundred civilians, lacking food and water, are holed up at the Azovstal Steel and Metallurgical Works with the Ukrainian Army’s 36th Battalion and Azov Regiment, the last two combat units in Mariupol, according to Ukrainian authorities.
Sviatoslav Palamar called on the “civilized world” to vouch for “security guarantees”, while assuring that the two battalions did not accept “the conditions of the Russian Federation regarding the surrender of arms and the capture of our defenders”.
“The situation is difficult, even critical,” he continued, in this huge factory, the last island of resistance in this port at the southern end of the Donbass, where “about a thousand civilians, women and children” and “hundreds of injured”, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The civilians trapped inside the factory, whose number could not be independently confirmed, “are afraid of the constant shelling,” adds Commander Palamar, calling for a ceasefire.
Previously, Kyiv had made a proposal. We are ready to hold a ‘special negotiation session’ in Mariupol. To save our boys [le bataillon] Azov, soldiers, civilians, children, living and wounded. All, Mykhaïlo Podoliak, adviser to the Ukrainian Presidency and one of the negotiators with Russia, tweeted on Wednesday evening.
Moscow, which has issued multiple ultimatums to Mariupol’s defenders, is determined to seize that port, which would allow it to link Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, to the pro-Russian separatist republics of Donbass.