The wives of the Azov regiment see Pope Francis: “We asked him to meet Putin and help us save our husbands”

Kateryna Prokopenko and Yulya Fedosiuk, wives of two officers of the Azov Battalion met Pope Francis this morning at the end of the general audience in St. Peter’s Square. The two women asked the Pontiff to pray for their husbands, but also for direct intervention.
The wives of the military of the Azov battalion, barricaded in the Azovstal industrial complex in Mariupol under the siege of Russian forces, asked Pope Francis to contact Vladimir Putin to intercede on behalf of their husbands. They told it themselves at the end of the meeting that the Pontiff granted them at the end of today’s audience. “We asked the Pope to come to Ukraine and speak to Putin and tell him to let them go,” they said, invoking the Pope’s intervention “as a third party”. The fear is that after the capture, their relatives can be tortured and killed, and even now inside the steel plant “700 soldiers are wounded, in very serious conditions with amputations and other problems”.
The two women said that inside the steel plant «They have no food, water, medicine and health care. It is a terrible situation. The water in the pipes of the steel plant is also running out. We can’t sit and watch this terrible news. Every day one or two wounded soldiers are dying. ‘ This is the situation in Mariupol’s Azovstal according to the story of Katarina and Yulia, wives of two soldiers from the Azov battalion who met the Pope. “There are six to seven hundred wounded soldiers who must be evacuated immediately to be treated.”
Fear of civilians inside
The story of the soldiers’ wives is dramatic. “We think there are still civilians inside the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol because there are military families. They are afraid of being evacuated because they are afraid that the Russian military will not let them go to the Ukrainian territories because the people who are evacuated from Azovstal first go to the Russian camps and the Russian Federation then does not let them go from there. They are afraid of being tortured and killed ».