Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has reached an agreement with Turkey to release Ukrainian fighters. The Kremlin is beside itself.
Kiev/Ankara – Despite agreements between Russia and Turkey, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has managed to bring senior Ukrainian officers home from Turkey. The release of the Azovstal fighters and their return to Ukraine caused an uproar, especially in the Kremlin. The Russian government sees this as a gross violation of Erdogan.
“Home,” Zelenskyy wrote on Saturday (July 8) on his Telegram channel to a photo that showed him on the plane with three commanders of the Azov regiment, the chief of the 36th Marine Infantry Brigade Serhiy Volynsk and the commander of the 12th Brigade .National Guard Brigade, Denys Schlehu, shows. In total, five Ukrainian commanders were released from Turkey. The Ukrainian President traveled to Turkey for an official visit and meetings with his counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Türkiye Releases Ukrainian Prisoners of War: What Do They Mean for Russia?
The men had been involved in defending the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol, which had been contested for months, since the start of the Ukraine war. Russian troops finally managed to take the city, but in the end several thousand Ukrainian soldiers, including fighters from the nationalist Azov regiment, were holed up in the Azovstal steelworks. Above all, the Kremlin had repeatedly used the nationalist Azov regiment as justification for the war against Ukraine and claimed that it had to “liberate” the country from “Nazis” and “fascists”.
After the capture of Azovstal, the men were first taken prisoner by the Russians, but were then extradited to Turkey in a prisoner exchange with Ukraine. According to an agreement between Moscow and Ankara, they were supposed to stay there until the end of the war. However, the Ukrainian presidential administration has now announced that there have been “negotiations with the Turkish side”. Accordingly, the fighters were allowed to return to Ukraine and were even received by Zelenskyj at Istanbul airport.
![Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Istanbul on July 7.](https://www.merkur.de/bilder/2023/07/10/92393715/32213656-der-tuerkische-praesident-recep-tayyip-erdogan-begruesst-den-ukrainischen-praesidenten-wolodymyr-selenskyj-am-juli-in-istanbul-2hhxtWw7lHBG.jpg)
Successful negotiations between Türkiye and Ukraine: This is how Putin reacts
The Russian government has sharply criticized the negotiations between Turkey and Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the return of the Ukrainian soldiers as a “direct violation of existing agreements” by both the Turkish and Ukrainian sides. Freeing the Azov commanders was conditional on the war being over. Peskow speculated that NATO put great pressure on Ankara to release the fighters anyway. According to his assumption, the goal was for Zelenskyj to be able to demonstrate success before the NATO summit and in view of the “defeats in the counter-offensive”.
According to the US think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) several Russian military bloggers also criticized the action. According to the ISW, one blogger wrote that Russia should not have trusted Turkey to honor the deal over the extradited Azovstal fighters because it is a “historic enemy”. Another, however, noted that the surrender of the Azovstal commanders undermined Moscow’s goal of “denazifying” Ukraine. The Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy, wrote on Twitter about Turkey: “Another country that cannot be trusted.” (nz/dpa)
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