Politico reports:

With Russia claiming to have taken prisoner nearly 2,500 Ukrainian fighters from the besieged Mariupol steel plant, concerns grew about their fate as a Moscow-backed separatist leader vowed they would face tribunals.

Russia has declared its full control of the Azovstal steel plant, which for weeks was the last holdout in Mariupol and a symbol of Ukrainian tenacity in the strategic port city, now in ruins with more than 20,000 residents feared dead. The seizure gives Russian President Vladimir Putin a badly wanted victory in the war he began nearly three months ago.

As the West rallies behind Ukraine, Polish President Andrzej Duda arrived in Ukraine on an unannounced visit and will address the country’s parliament on Sunday, his office said.

Poland, which has welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees since the start of the war, is a strong supporter of Ukraine’s desire to join the European Union. With Russia blocking Ukraine’s sea ports, Poland has become a major gateway for Western humanitarian aid and weapons going into Ukraine and has been helping Ukraine get its grain and other agricultural products to world markets.

The Russian Defense Ministry released video of Ukrainian soldiers being detained after announcing that its forces had removed the last holdouts from the Mariupol plant’s extensive underground tunnels. It said a total of 2,439 had surrendered.

Family members of the fighters, who came from a variety of military and law enforcement units, have pleaded for them to be given rights as prisoners of war and eventually returned to Ukraine. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Saturday that Ukraine “will fight for the return” of every one of them.

Denis Pushilin, the pro-Kremlin head of an area of eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, said the captured fighters included some foreign nationals, though he did not provide details. He said they were sure to face a tribunal. Russian officials and state media have sought to characterize the fighters as neo-Nazis and criminals. [Continue reading…]

Vladislav Davidzon writes:

The Azov Battalion was originally one of many volunteer formations forged in 2014 in order to resist Russian proxies and the Russian regular army in eastern Ukraine. At the time, the hollowed-out Ukrainian state had no capacity to fight back against Moscow. As innumerable critics with limited understanding of Ukrainian politics never tire of pointing out, the founder of Azov, Andriy Biletsky, is indeed a figure who holds racist and white supremacist views. Early Azov was home to all sorts of freakish characters, and Biletsky certainly sought and maintained relationships with neo-Nazi groups throughout Russia and Europe. Like many other private militias of the early post-Maidan period, there were also allegations of criminal activity against the recently demobilized men of Azov who were often used as hired guns to settle local conflicts.

In the summer and fall of 2014, Azov distinguished itself by the ferocity with which it successfully fought against the Russian-led separatists then attempting to occupy Mariupol. Paradoxically—at least for purveyors of Kremlin propaganda, which holds that Ukrainians have been oppressing ethnic Russians—most Azov members are in fact Russian speakers and disproportionally hail from the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine. Even more ironically, according to my friend Anton Shekhovtsov, the preeminent scholar of the Russian and Ukrainian far right, “On average they speak better Russian than the Russian invaders. This fact alone dismisses blatant Kremlin lies about Azov allegedly fighting against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.” In June 2014, when Azov helped liberate Mariupol from pro-Russian forces, it “proved not only Azov’s combat effectiveness but also their truly pro-Ukrainian position. Because of its proven fighting abilities, Azov started to attract more volunteers, and many of them had no political background at all.”

There were certainly valid concerns about radicalism and warlordism at the time, and the far-right elements within Azov were distrusted by the majority of the public, as well as by senior figures in the government. When Azov was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard in the autumn of 2014, placing it in the chain of command of the Interior Ministry, then-President Petro Poroshenko was rightly fearful of the potential for disgruntled or uncontrollable veterans of Azov and other volunteer groups to pose a possible threat to the state. Poroshenko ensured that members of the security services were integrated into the battalion in order to keep an eye on the men identified as potentially independent-minded loose cannons.

These days, the ranks of the battalion are drawn from the regular, countrywide pool of military and national guard recruits. The influence of Biletsky dissipated as soon as he left Azov in October 2014; his later attempts to create a parallel movement, the “National Corps,” were the result of his de jure exclusion from the military and his declining influence. The confederation of right-wing political parties that he corralled into a common platform during the 2019 elections failed to win more than 2% of the national vote, while the Jewish presidential candidate, Volodymyr Zelensky, won with 73%. The original, post-Maidan composition of Azov was quickly diluted, and the ghost of Biletsky was replaced with regular officers of the Interior Ministry. By 2017, the battalion as a whole remained distinguished—but for its martial prowess, not for some distinct political ideology. [Continue reading…]