Two Ukrainian women whose husbands are defending a besieged steel plant in the southern city of Mariupol are calling for any evacuation of civilians to also include soldiers, saying they fear the troops will be tortured and killed if left behind and captured by Russian forces.
“The lives of soldiers matter too. We can’t only talk about civilians,” said Yuliia Fedusiuk, 29, the wife of Arseniy Fedusiuk, a member of the Azov Regiment in Mariupol.
“We are hoping that we can rescue soldiers too, not only dead, not only injured, but all of them.”
She and Kateryna Prokopenko, whose husband, Denys Prokopenko, is the Azov commander, made their appeal in Rome for international assistance to evacuate the Azovstal plant, the last stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the strategic and now bombed-out port city.
An estimated 2,000 Ukrainian defenders and 1,000 civilians are holed up in the plant’s vast underground network of bunkers, which are able to withstand air strikes.
But conditions there have grown more dire, with food, water and medicine running out, after Russian forces dropped “bunker busters” and other munitions in recent days.
The United Nations has said secretary-general Antonio Guterres and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed on arranging evacuations from the plant during a meeting this week in Moscow, with the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross involved. But the discussions as reported by the UN concerned civilians, not combatants.
Speaking in English, Mrs Prokopenko, 27, called for a Dunkirk-style mission, a reference to the Second World War maritime operation launched to rescue British and Allied troops surrounded by German forces in northern France.
“We can do this extraction operation… which will save our soldiers, our civilians, our kids,” she said. “We need to do this right now, because people – every hour, every second – are dying.”
