The government’s order for hundreds of remaining fighters to stand down offers Russia a propaganda victory, but prospects for a prisoner swap seem unclear at best.
Hundreds of die-hard Ukrainian soldiers who had made a last stand against Russian forces from a Mariupol steel mill faced an uncertain future Tuesday under Kremlin custody after Ukraine’s military ordered them to surrender. The surrender directive, issued late Monday, made the soldiers prisoners and ended the most protracted battle so far of the nearly three-month-old Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even as Russia has struggled on other battlefronts, the surrender at Mariupol solidified one of Russia’s few significant territorial achievements — the conquest of a once-thriving southeast port. The surrender also gave Russia’s state-run media the ingredients for claiming its side was winning. Still, Mariupol has been largely reduced to ruin, Ukrainian officials say that more than 20,000 inhabitants were killed, and the city has come to symbolize the war’s grotesque horrors. By early Tuesday, many of the fighters ensconced in a warren of shelters under the Azovstal steel mill, a Soviet-era complex besieged by the Russians for weeks, had emerged and surrendered. They were transported to Russian-held territory aboard buses emblazoned with “Z” — the Russian emblem for what President Vladimir V. Putin has called his country’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities said little about the terms of the surrender except to assert that the Ukrainian fighters were heroes and that as prisoners they would soon be exchanged for Russian prisoners held by Ukraine.
“The only thing that can be said is that the Ukrainian state is doing everything possible and impossible” to save the soldiers, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. But Russian officials said nothing about an exchange — on the contrary, they raised the prospect that at least some of the prisoners would be treated as war criminals. Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s equivalent to the F. B. I. , said Tuesday that investigators would interrogate the captured fighters to “check their involvement in crimes committed against civilians.”
And the prosecutor general’s office asked Russia’s Supreme Court to declare the military unit to which most of the captured fighters belong, the Azov battalion, a terrorist organization. Russian news media have seized on the Azov battalion’s connections to far-right movements to provide a veneer of credibility to the Kremlin’s false claims that Russia’s forces were fighting Nazis in Ukraine. The Russian threats against the prisoners raised questions about the viability of the terms Ukraine had negotiated with Moscow to surrender, and whether the hundreds of troops still remaining inside the steel plant would abide by the deal.
