On board the buses, according to a video from Reuters, there were also women. Some wore olive green uniforms, as did most of the men. Everyone looked exhausted. One was leaning against travel bags stacked on the floor.
Destiny uncertain
What will happen to the fighters now is unclear. The Kremlin said Putin personally guaranteed that the prisoners would be treated according to international standards and Ukrainian officials said they could be exchanged for Russian prisoners. However, this scenario does not seem so realistic at the moment. The Tass news agency reported that a Russian pool had interrogated soldiers, many of them members of the Azov battalion, as part of an investigation into what Moscow calls “crimes of the Ukrainian regime”. Donetsk separatist leader Denis Pushilin said it will be a court to decide the fate of the Ukrainian fighters who surrendered at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.
Although, as Reuters recalls, both sides were talking about an agreement under which all Ukrainian troops would abandon the steel mills, many details are unclear or not yet public, including how many fighters are still inside and whether a form of prisoner exchange agreed.
“Animals to be executed”
In spite of Ukrainian hopes, the voices raised by Russia are quite different from an exchange agreement. The parliamentarians spoke out against any exchange of prisoners, and Vyacheslav Volodin, president of the State Duma, the Russian lower house, said: “Nazi criminals should not be exchanged.” But there are also more extreme positions, such as that of Leonid Slutsky, one of Russia’s negotiators in talks with Ukraine, who called the fighters who came out of the Azovstal steel plant “animals in human form” and said they should be executed.
Instead, a difficult agreement is being sought from Kiev. And regarding the worrying statements coming from Moscow, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar says that the appeals to try some of the people taken from the steel mills for war crimes “were most likely made for Russia’s internal propaganda”.