If Russia’s President Vladimir Putin hoped to mark Victory Day on Monday by celebrating the capture or surrender of Mariupol’s last Ukrainian defenders, a Zoom appearance by their commanders suggests he’ll have to wait.
Speaking in a lengthy online news conference on Sunday, an intelligence officer of the Azov regiment holed up in the southeastern port city’s massive Azovstal steel factory said surrender would amount to suicide. He said they had enough food and weapons to hold out a while yet.
Describing their increasingly grim, and likely ultimately hopeless, circumstances, Illia Samoilenko also made clear his bitterness with the Ukrainian government in Kyiv. It had, he said, failed in its defense of southern Ukraine, where Russia made much faster progress than in the north, and had abandoned Mariupol’s garrison to its fate.
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