Russia’s Claim of Mariupol’s Capture Fuels Concern for POWs

 An aerial view of a residential area destroyed by Russian shelling in Irpin close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, May 21, 2022. (AP)
An aerial view of a residential area destroyed by Russian shelling in Irpin close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, May 21, 2022. (AP)
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Russia’s Claim of Mariupol’s Capture Fuels Concern for POWs

 An aerial view of a residential area destroyed by Russian shelling in Irpin close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, May 21, 2022. (AP)
An aerial view of a residential area destroyed by Russian shelling in Irpin close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, May 21, 2022. (AP)

Russia’s claimed seizure of a Mariupol steel plant that became a symbol of Ukrainian tenacity gives Russian President Vladimir Putin a badly wanted victory in the war he began, capping a nearly three-month siege that left a city in ruins and more than 20,000 residents feared dead.

After the Russian Defense Ministry announced late Friday that its forces had removed the last Ukrainian fighters from the plant's miles of underground tunnels, concern mounted for the Ukrainian defenders who now are prisoners in Russian hands.
Denis Pushilin, the head of an area of eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, said Saturday that the Ukrainians, considered heroes by their fellow citizens, were sure to face a tribunal for their wartime actions.

"I believe that a tribunal is inevitable here. I believe that justice must be restored. There is a request for this from ordinary people, society, and, probably, the sane part of the world community," Russian state news agency Tass quoted Pushilin as saying.

Russian officials and state media repeatedly have tried to characterize the fighters who holed up in the Azovstal steel plant as neo-Nazis. Among the plant's more than 2,400 defenders were members of the Azov Regiment, a national guard unit with roots in the far right.

The Ukrainian government has not commented on Russia's claim of capturing Azovstal, which for weeks remained Mariupol's last holdout of Ukrainian resistance, and with it completing Moscow's long-sought goal of controlling the city, home to a strategic seaport.

Ukraine's military this week told the fighters holed up in the plant, hundreds of them wounded, that their mission was complete and they could come out. It described their extraction as an evacuation, not a mass surrender.

The end of the battle for Mariupol would help Putin offset some stinging setbacks, including the failure of Russian troops to take over Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, the sinking of the Russian Navy’s flagship in the Black Sea and the continued resistance that has stalled an offensive in eastern Ukraine.

The impact of Russia's declared victory on the broader war in Ukraine remained unclear. Many Russian troops already had been redeployed from Mariupol to elsewhere in the conflict, which began when Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov reported Saturday that Russia had destroyed a Ukrainian special-operations base in the Black Sea region of Odesa as well as a significant cache of Western-supplied weapons in northern Ukraine's Zhytomyr region. There was no confirmation from the Ukrainian side.

In its morning operational report, the Ukrainian military general staff reported heavy fighting in much of eastern Ukraine, including the areas of Sievierodonetsk, Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

After failing to capture Kyiv, Russia focused its offensive on the country's eastern industrial heartland. The Russia-backed separatists have controlled parts of the Donbas region since 2014, and Moscow wants to expand the territory under its control.

The seizure of Mariupol furthers Russia’s quest to essentially create a land bridge from Russia stretching through the Donbas region to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russia was working to restore the port and remove mines.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded anew that Russia pay "in one way or another for everything it has destroyed in Ukraine. Every burned house. Every ruined school, ruined hospital. Each blown up house of culture and infrastructure facility. Every destroyed enterprise."

"Of course, the Russian state will not even recognize that it is an aggressor,” he said in an address late Friday. "But its recognition is not required."

Zelenskyy expressed gratitude to his US counterpart, Joe Biden, who signed off Saturday on a fresh, $40 billion infusion of aid for the war-ravaged nation. Half of the funding provides military assistance.

Mariupol, which is part of the Donbas, was blockaded early in the war and became a frightening example to people elsewhere in the country of the hunger, terror and death they might face if the Russians surrounded their communities.

As the end drew near at the steel plant, wives of fighters who had held out told of what they feared would be their last contact with their husbands.

Olga Boiko, the wife of a marine, wiped away tears as she shared the words her husband wrote her on Thursday: "Hello. We surrender, I don’t know when I will get in touch with you and if I will at all. Love you. Kiss you. Bye."

The seaside steelworks, occupying some 11 square kilometers (4 square miles), had been a battleground for weeks. Drawing Russian airstrikes, artillery and tank fire, the dwindling group of outgunned fighters held out with the help of airdrops before their government ordered them to abandon the plant.

Zelenskyy revealed in an interview published Friday that Ukrainian helicopter pilots braved Russian anti-aircraft fire to ferry in medicine, food and water to the steel mill as well as to retrieve bodies and rescue wounded fighters.

A "very large" number of the pilots died on their daring missions, he said. "They are absolutely heroic people, who knew that it would be difficult, knew that to fly would be almost impossible," Zelenskyy said.

Russia claimed that the Azov Regiment's commander was taken away from the plant in an armored vehicle because of local residents' alleged hatred for him, but no evidence of Ukrainian antipathy toward the nationalist regiment has emerged.

The Kremlin has seized on the regiment's far-right origins in its drive to cast the invasion as a battle against Nazi influence in Ukraine. Russian authorities have threatened to put some of the steel mill’s defenders on trial for alleged war crimes.

With Russia controlling the city, Ukrainian authorities are likely to face delays in documenting evidence of alleged Russian atrocities in Mariupol, including the bombings of a maternity hospital and a theater where hundreds of civilians had taken cover.

Satellite images in April showed what appeared to be mass graves just outside Mariupol, where local officials accused Russia of concealing the slaughter by burying up to 9,000 civilians.

Earlier this month, hundreds of civilians were evacuated from the plant during humanitarian cease-fires and spoke of the terror of ceaseless bombardment, the dank conditions underground and the fear that they wouldn’t make it out alive.

At one point in the siege, Pope Francis lamented that Mariupol had become a "city of martyrs."

An estimated 100,000 of the 450,000 people who resided there before the war remain. Many, trapped by Russia’s siege, were left without food, water and electricity.

The chief executive of Metinvest, a multinational company that owns the Azovstal plant and another steel mill, Ilyich, in Mariupol, spoke of the city's devastation in an interview published Saturday in Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

"The Russians are trying to clean it (the city) up to hide their crimes,'' the newspaper quoted Metinvest CEO Yuriy Ryzhenkov as saying. ”The inhabitants are trying to make the city function, to make water supplies work again."

"But the sewer system is damaged, there has been flooding, and infections are feared” from drinking the water, he said.

The Ilyich steelworks still has some intact infrastructure, but if the Russians try to get it running, Ukrainians will refuse to return to their jobs there, Ryzhenkov said.

"We will never work under Russian occupation,'' he said.



UN Nuclear Head to Visit Iran for Talks on Country’s Nuclear Program as Next Trump Presidency Looms

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi during a meeting with the Japanese government in Tokyo Thursday, March 14, 2024. (AP)
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi during a meeting with the Japanese government in Tokyo Thursday, March 14, 2024. (AP)
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UN Nuclear Head to Visit Iran for Talks on Country’s Nuclear Program as Next Trump Presidency Looms

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi during a meeting with the Japanese government in Tokyo Thursday, March 14, 2024. (AP)
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi during a meeting with the Japanese government in Tokyo Thursday, March 14, 2024. (AP)

The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Sunday he will travel to Iran in the coming days to hold talks regarding the country's nuclear program. The visit comes amid wider tensions gripping the Mideast over the Israel-Hamas war and uncertainty over how US President-elect Donald Trump will approach Iran after his inauguration in January.

Specifically, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mariano Grossi, will have high level meetings with the Iranian government and will hold technical discussions on all aspects related to the joint statement agreed with Iran in March 2023.

It is intended as a path forward for cooperation between the IAEA and Iran on how to expand inspections of the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing atomic program.

The 2023 statement included a pledge by Iran to resolve issues around sites where inspectors have questions about possible undeclared nuclear activity, and to allow the IAEA to "implement further appropriate verification and monitoring activities."

The meetings in Tehran will build on Grossi's discussions with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, a statement by the IAEA said.

"It is essential that we make substantive progress in the implementation of the joint statement agreed with Iran in March 2023," Grossi said. "My visit to Tehran will be very important in that regard."

Iran is rapidly advancing its atomic program and continues to increase its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels in defiance of international demands, according to recent reports by the IAEA.

Grossi, has warned that Tehran has enough uranium enriched to near-weapons-grade levels to make "several" nuclear bombs if it chose to do so. He has acknowledged the UN agency cannot guarantee that none of Iran’s centrifuges may have been peeled away for clandestine enrichment.

Iran’s 2015 landmark nuclear deal with world powers had put limits on its nuclear program — which the West fears could be used for making nuclear weapons although Tehran insists is only for peaceful purposes — while lifting punitive economic sanctions imposed on Iran.

But the deal collapsed after the Trump administration in 2018 pulled the United States out of the agreement, leading Iran to abandon all limits the deal had put on its program and enrich uranium to up to 60% purity.

That is just a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. By IAEA’s definition, around 42 kilograms (92.5 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60% is the amount at which creating one atomic weapon is theoretically possible.

As Trump is to take office again in a few weeks, Iranians are divided on what his next presidency will bring. Some foresee an all-out war between Tehran and Washington, particularly as other conflicts rage in the region. Others hold out hope that America’s 47th president might engage in unexpected diplomacy as he did with North Korea.