Unreturned Prisoners

Live from Ukraine

Kyiv — Following complex negotiations with the Russian side, which required the mediation of the UN and the International Red Cross, on 7 May 2022, the last civilian remaining barricaded inside the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol’ abandoned the tormented territories in which he had found refuge.

A couple of weeks after the evacuation of civilians, over 900 soldiers of the 12th Special Azov Brigade left that structure in an orderly manner, where they managed to resist heroically for 86 days, carrying out the eviction order given by the highest military and political authorities in Kyiv. Despite the guarantees received, most of them took the surrender order badly, trying to resist until the end and then leaving in small groups and dispersing to the surrounding territories. It was explained to them that similar actions would violate the command order and compromise the entire group’s safety.

It was May 20, 2022.

The defenders of Mariupol’ had just saved Ukraine by forcing the invaders to concentrate a frightening amount of fire on that last bastion. Against the Azovstal, the Russians used every type of munition, including phosphorus, thermobaric, cluster, and chemical. The brave people inside were able to resist for three months in desperate physical and mental conditions, without food, water, or medicine, and under 24-hour bombardment.

[embed]Exactly two years from that day, Ukraine remembers the names of those who ended up paying the price for that undertaking with their lives or freedom.

After killing between 53 and 62 (burning them alive) on July 29 of that same year and wounding between 75 and 130 in the massacre of the penal colony of Olenivka, the Russians never returned to Ukraine most of its heroes of the Azovstal.

Although attempts were made to re-involve the representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations in the process of restitution of those Ukrainian soldiers for whom they had acted as guarantors, the Russian Federation covered up all information about them, systematically violating every provision of the Third Convention of Geneva on the treatment of prisoners of war.

I took this picture in Kyiv — copyrighted photo Giorgio Provinciali.

The Russians promised to return them within 3–4 months, guaranteeing their physical inviolability, while those few who were freed in these two years revealed that they had been tortured and mistreated in an inhumane manner.

In total, the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights estimates that the number of Ukrainian prisoners still held in Russia amounts to around ten thousand. Behind this number — already impressive in itself — there are just as many profoundly touching stories as those I described with Alla Perdei after meeting some of the 2,681 Ukrainian soldiers and 147 civilians repatriated so far as part of the only 49 exchanges with the Russian Federation.

Tens of thousands of other families live in the eternal limbo of knowing their loved ones have disappeared. Nothing is known about them. Their names do not appear either in the Russian registers, which take into account those in captivity, nor in the Ukrainian registers, which include those who have died.

my article for the Italian newspaper «La Ragione» — copyrighted content Giorgio Provinciali.

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