The Russian authorities are going to organise a court martial for those Ukrainian soldiers who were defending the Azovstal steel plant in the last months and recently surrendered themselves, Interfax cites an insider source.
“The first ‘provisional’ trial will be held in Mariupol,” says the source. More stages of the trial are to follow, possibly held in other locations.
Denis Pushilin, head of the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’, said today that the Ukrainian captives from the Azovstal steelworks were in the DPR territory. He claims they are facing court martial there, although Andrey Rudenko, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, says the Azovstal captives may possibly be subject to a POW exchange.
The Russian Defence Ministry reports capturing a total of 2,439 Ukrainian soldiers. However, there is evidence that Russia may be overstating the number of Ukrainian soldiers evacuated from the Mariupol steelworks to arrange a beneficial prisoner swap or to avoid admitting that in fact hundreds, not thousands of Ukrainian soldiers had controlled the area for such a long time, according to the US-based Institute for the Study of War. The International Committee for the Red Cross has only registered “hundreds” of Ukrainian captives.
