Giada Oricchio May 22, 2022
“Azovstal symbol of propaganda. A serious mistake by Ukraine”. Domenico Quirico, historical war correspondent, analyzed for the newspaper La Stampa the capitulation of more than 2,000 Kiev soldiers, including the Azov battalion, who were barricaded in the Mariupol Steelworks and erected as a symbol of the resistance of the Ukrainian people.
“It is the umpteenth war of the poor people, whether in uniform or not, the only real war in the sea of lies. Those of Azovstal, the vanquished of Azovstal, terrible name of iron and blood. Now that it has ended without glory, but only with immense useless victims, a Ukrainian giarabub really strikes me: thousands of men cut off from the battle that matters but being used as propaganda, the stubborn . .. those who do not give up … who prevent the Russians from advancing,” Quirico writes today, underlining that when we were in North Africa, overwhelmed by the British, it was “propaganda” to hide strategic mistakes and defeats invented the epic resistance of a remote, useless Libyan oasis that the enemy neglected because it wasn’t even worth crossing the desert”.
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy gave the order for surrender: he waited for May 9, the day of the Victory Parade, so as not to give Putin the opportunity to wave a triumph, but he had to give in because this resistance had turned into martyrdom, it would have been impossible to keep the door open for a (future) negotiation.
Quirico observes: “Now that they have lost the battle and are worn down by hunger and weariness, wrapped in dirty and tattered uniforms, I look at them: hard unruly foreheads, yes, they are a new race, a tough one, shaped by Eight years of war. . Then, one after the other, they march in double file to the buses that will take them to a very uncertain fate. The silence of humiliation was broken only by the order “to show the tattoos in search of those of the fascist regiment.”
For Domenico Quirico there is only one culprit for this sacrifice: “Azovstal was a serious mistake by the Ukrainians. Having sacrificed the strongest fighters in a useless and hopeless defense instead of letting them flee if possible. The sequences of these defeated soldiers, celebrated for eighty days as fearless, invincible heroes, weigh far more than the images of the carcasses of Russian tanks or wrecked Russian vehicles. (…). A piece of iron says nothing, a man who gives up is already a symbol”.