The General Staff of the Ukrainian Army said on Tuesday that the soldiers who resisted the Russian military forces at the Azovstal steel mill, in the city of Mariupol, in the southeast of the country, have fulfilled their mission, after having managed to evacuate more than 200 soldiers from the area.
“The Mariupol garrison fulfilled its combat mission. The Supreme Military Command ordered the commanders of the units stationed in Azovstal to save the lives of the personnel” who remain there, the military high command assured in a statement posted on Facebook and reproduced local agencies.
These instructions were given hours after the evacuation of 53 seriously wounded soldiers from the steel millwho were transferred to a medical center in Novoazovsk, in the area occupied by Russian forces.
Another 211 defenders were evacuated through the humanitarian corridor to Olenivka, also in Moscow-controlled territory.
All of them, according to the kyiv government, will return to the territory under Ukrainian control through an exchange procedure.
(Read more: Ukraine: more than 260 Ukrainian fighters evacuated from Azovstal, Mariupol).
The military statement does not clarify, on the other hand, if there are still soldiers in the steel facilities that have been bombed by the Russians for weeksNor do they specify who was responsible for the transfer of the Russian soldiers, most of them linked to the ultra-nationalist Azov regiment.
The defenders of Mariupol are the heroes of our time. They will be forever in history
It is also unknown how the hypothetical exchange of these soldiers for Russian prisoners of war captured in Ukraine will take place, according to the agreement reached between the two countries, of which not many details have been offered.
“The defenders of Mariupol are the heroes of our time. They will forever be in history,” said the note that speaks of the components of this detachment, which include elements of the “special forces of the ‘Azov’ regiment, the 12th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, the 36th Brigade of the Marine Corps, border guards, policemen, volunteers and the Mariupol Territorial Defense”, among others.
According to the military command, “thanks to maintaining positions in Azovstal we did not allow the enemy to transfer a detachment of 17 groups of tactical battalions (about 20,000 troops) to other parts” of Ukraine.
“Therefore, they prevented the implementation of the (Russian) plan for the rapid capture of the city of Zaporizhia (south) and to reach the administrative border of regions” such as the pro-Russian Donetsk, in the east.
(Read on: Ukraine pressures the EU to sanction all Russian exports.)
“Holding the main enemy forces around Mariupol allowed us to prepare and create defensive lines where our troops are today and dignifiedly push back the aggressor. We had critically needed time to form our reserves, regroup forces, receive assistance from our partners,” the statement said.
Therefore, “the most important common task for all of Ukraine and the whole world is to save the lives of the defenders of Mariupol,” the General Staff reiterated.
The coastal city of Mariupol has been under siege by Russian troops practically since the invasion of the country began on February 24.
The city, on the shores of the Sea of Azov, was heavily bombed and practically destroyed, with the population unable to flee the area living in subhuman conditions.
(Also: Russia withdraws from Kharkov: Ukraine retakes control of the border).
For weeks, only several hundred soldiers offered resistance to the Russian troops entrenched in the facilities of the Azovstal steel complex, where civilians who were evacuated on May 7 also took refuge.
The fall to Russian hands of this last military stronghold of Mariupol would provide Moscow with the possibility of establishing a corridor between the Ukrainian east (the Donbas) and the Crimean peninsula, which it has already controlled since 2014.
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EFE
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