Besieged for more than two months. The commander’s grandfather fought against the Russians in 1939
Long beards, worn faces, bloody arms and legs. For two months barricaded in what has become a symbol for all of Ukraine. The bulwark of a city that fights and resists.
Mariupol and the Azovstal Steel Works, the barrier that the Russians cannot break through. A few thousand boys in camouflage, Ukrainian army soldiers and men from the Azov regiment chatted about sympathies for the far right.
The man leading them, Denis Prokopenko, who was honored by Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019, had refused a military salute to the Ukrainian president. “Civilians are not allowed,” he declared, but controversy erupted. Today they are the two leading figures of an entire country. heroes, almost in spite of them. “They hardly go to the surface, they only go to the mountains to find food and water. Most of the time they sit in bunkers. They are pessimistic because there is almost no hope of rescue. They are preparing for the final battle because they don’t believe in a diplomatic solution». Prokopenko’s wife Kateryna was received by Pope Francis a few days ago. Along with Julia, the wife of another fighter from the besieged steel mill, Arseniy Fedosiuk. They brought requests for help, they sought hope for salvation. They fear a tragic ending.
Denis Prokopenko is an abnormal soldier. Even though he’s been fighting since 2014. In that Donbass, unknown to the world at the time, which everyone recognizes on maps today. Redis, as his men call the commandant, is a graduate of the Department of Germanic Philology at Kyiv University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree with a specialization in teaching English.
His family of Finnish-Karelian origin has had an account with the Russians since 1939. His grandfather is the sole survivor of the Red Army raids. “It seems that I am continuing the same war, only on a different part of the front, a war against the Kremlin’s occupying regime…”.
He is also a big fan, more than an Ultras, of Dynamo Kyiv, the team that owned Andryi Shevchenko and Igor Belanov, former Golden Ball, today also on the barricades of a game worthy of all the others he has played has played.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or in three hours,” says Kateryna, who only gets brief messages from her husband. Yulia carries it out into the world: “What happens in the steel mill is not a reality show.” Two months ago Zelenskyy tried to award it again: with an even more prestigious medal: the official title “Ukrainian Hero” with the Order of the Golden Cross “for personal courage and heroism shown in defense of state sovereignty and territorial integrity became Ukraine and for loyalty to their military oath”.
Wars that bring together even those who were previously on opposite sides. But that’s no consolation.
May 16, 2022 (Change May 16, 2022 | 22:59)
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