Footage shows a child wearing a makeshift diaper made from bandages and plastic bags, sleeping in a damp, moldy room. The elderly woman with a bandaged head was seen wearing a uniform jacket, once worn by steel mill workers, as she shivered uncontrollably. And small children make lamentable demands. “We want to go home,” one girl said. “We want to see the sunshine.”
These scenes are from video shared online in recent days by the Azov regiment, a unit in the Ukrainian army, which said they were filmed in a mazelo-like bunker beneath the vast Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine. Russian soldiers controlled the rest of the city, and fighting continued around the factory. This factory has become the last refuge for thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians trapped. There is no way out, and little chance of rescue.
The independent journalists who had been documenting the siege of Mariupol for the Western media left a month and a half ago because the security risk was too great. The warring parties have joined to fill the void of live coverage, sharing content from the ground and, in Azov’s case, pleading for help for their hundreds of thousands of followers across the globe. social media.
With virtually no cell phone service, electricity or internet access, Azov’s videos offer what may be some glimpses into life at the steel mill.
Earlier Thursday, Azov warplanes said Russian forces had bombed a field hospital in the factory, killing wounded soldiers and burying people in the rubble. Reports of the attack renewal calls are reminded from Ukrainian officials and the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians.
Supply in the factory is said to be very low. Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said at a news conference on Friday: “It’s not a matter of days, it’s a matter of hours.
“If Mariupol is hell, Azovstal is worse.”
Russia sees capturing the port city as crucial to securing a land bridge along Ukraine’s south connecting Crimea with the Donbas, and its forces have relentlessly shelled the plant. The devastation there – city officials say tens of thousands of residents have died – is considered one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the war.
“We are shooting these videos to draw attention to the fact that they are at the factory, so that the enemy does not say that there are no civilians here,” said Captain Svyatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment. based at the factory, told The New York Times in a text message.
“So they can be evacuated.”
The Times was unable to independently verify the exact location of the videos, but the interior appears to match the design of the factory, and a former employee familiar with the facility confirmed that the images appear to be was created there.
Since April 18, Azov has released a number of videos focusing on ordinary people who say they are trapped at the factory, and mainly women and children. “I want everyone who watches this video to help us create this green corridor to help us get out of here,” said a mother holding her toddler in a video released on April 24, as Ukraine is celebrating Orthodox Easter. “Safe. Alive. Civilians and soldiers.”
While Azov was a party to the conflict, The Times verified footage previously released by the group. In a recently shared video, Azov soldiers enjoy food for children and chat with adults. The relationship between the soldiers and those appearing on camera and the circumstances that created these images is unclear.
Graphic images shared on April 26 on social media accounts associated with the regiment show wounded people lying on stretchers on a concrete floor, in a makeshift hospital in a steel mill.
Two days later, Azov posted a video to his social media channels of what they said were the aftermath of Russian attacks on a makeshift hospital inside Azovstal. The footage shows about two dozen people, some of them wearing bandages and bandages, sitting inside a dimly lit room. A man with a headlamp was seen digging through the rubble. Another was holding a plastic bottle in shaking hands and sobbing.
Mikhail Vershinin, head of the Donetsk Regional Patrol Police, said: “The attack was carried out in an area where many people were injured. “People were buried under the rubble, some were dead. There are injured people – the wounded lie on the wounds they already have. ”
The Azov Regiment was originally formed in May 2014 as the Azov Battalion, named for the waters where Mariupol and its now destroyed port, to defend the city from pro-Moscow forces attack. At the time, it was known to its far-right, nationalist members who were used by the Kremlin to justify its military campaign as having “anti-fascist” purposes.
The group’s controversial reputation remains and although it still has some nationalist members, analysts say the unit, now known as the Azov regiment, has grown since its inception. integrated into the regular combat force of the Ukrainian army.
Several soldiers have been inside the factory since March 1, Captain Palamar told The Times.
Maria Zolkina, a Ukrainian political analyst with the Organization for Democratic Initiatives, said the regimental leadership made the decision to publicly coordinate with their plea for evacuation and exploit because they feel they have run out of alternatives.
“They started going public as much as they could when their division in Mariupol was completely surrounded,” she said, noting that they may feel no longer an option to push back the Russian forces militarily, or lose hope of successful negotiations between the two sides. .
“The city has practically been wiped off the planet,” said one commander, identified as Serhiy Volyna, in an uploaded video on Wednesday, on purpose from inside the factory. In a three-minute plea, he said more than 600 wounded soldiers, along with “hundreds of civilians and dozens of children” would perish if a humanitarian corridor could not be organized.
“Please save the city of Mariupol,” he begged. “Let’s organize a mining procedure.”
“People will simply die here,” he added.
Michael Schwirtz Reporting contributions from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, and Brent McDonald from Washington. Alexandra Koroleva Research contributions from New York.
