“To make the war criminals of Azov the object of political negotiations is blasphemy against the history of 1941,” Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said on Telegram today, quoted by the Efe news agency.
Medinsky considered it wrong and inappropriate to compare Azovstal with the resistance of the defenders of the fortress of Brest (Belarus) in the face of the advancing Nazi troops.
The Russian negotiator wondered if these Soviet soldiers used human shields, shot civilians in the back, traded civilians for food and medicine, or agreed to be withdrawn to other countries with the promise not to fight the enemy.
Speaking of war crimes, Medinsky is referring to the “genocide,” as he calls it in Moscow, committed over the past eight years by the Ukrainian army against the civilian population of Donbass.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, announcing the Russian “special war” in Ukraine, used the “denazification” of the country as one of the arguments, calling neo-Nazis “bastards”.
Turkey has shown readiness to accept the fighters who are in the steel company in the port of Mariupol (Sea of Azov), among which there will be more than a thousand wounded.
A group of family members of militants, mostly women, went to Turkey to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in whose country negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow were taking place.
This week, former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko appealed to the international community to rescue those still standing at the Azovstal plant, where they say a group of civilians still reside.
In the letter, the former heads of state ask for help “with all available diplomatic resources” to the Kyiv authorities to save the lives of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers whom “Russia is trying to destroy on the orders of [Presidente russo Vladimir] Putin by barbaric methods in the Azovstal complex.
Although Putin has ordered an end to the attack on the unit, Ukrainian officials say the bombing is proceeding intensively.
According to a Mariupol deputy on Telegram, Russian soldiers used white phosphorus bombs in the fight for control of the city in the Donetsk region.
