A group of wives of soldiers from Ukraine’s Azov battalion on Wednesday (11) called on Pope Francis to intervene to “save the lives of soldiers” who had been hiding for several weeks in the Azovstal Steel Works in Mariupol besieged by the Red Army had entrenched.
“We ask the Pope to visit Ukraine, talk to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and tell him to let her go,” Kateryna Prokopenko, 27, wife of Azov’s battalion commander Denis Prokopenko, told reporters on End of the general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
The request to the Pope was made due to the traditional greeting of some of those present during a fiveminute session after the end of the general audience.
“We hope that this meeting will save her life. We are ready for every gesture of the Pope, his delegation. Our soldiers are ready to lay down their arms in case of evacuation to a third country,” he added.
Picture: UOL Art.No
“We told the Pope that we have 700 wounded soldiers suffering from gangrene, amputations (…). Many of them died, we couldn’t bury them,” said Yulia Fedosiuk, 29 years old.
“We ask the Pope for help to act and intervene as a third party in this war so that they can leave through a humanitarian corridor. He told us that he is praying for us and will do whatever he can,” he said.
The meeting was also attended by Russian opposition figure Piotr Verzilov, cofounder of the protest group Pussy Riot and creator of the website Mediazona, which specializes in following oppositionrelated legal cases.
According to a Ukrainian government official who was looking for a way to evacuate the seriously injured, there were no civilians left at the steel mill following last week’s evacuations.
The military’s conditions are “horrific,” “no water, no food, no medical equipment,” said Fedosiuk, who fears Russian forces will capture, torture and kill them.
According to Kyiv, “more than a thousand soldiers” are still holed up in the industrial complex, including “hundreds of wounded” who are in the labyrinth of galleries under the factory.
The controversial Azov Battalion, created in 2014 and seen by some as a neoNazi militia and heroes by others, is at the center of a propaganda war between Ukraine and Russia that has used the “denazification” of the former Soviet republic as justification for a military operation in the country.