Five Ukrainian commanders of the Azov regiment, hailed in Ukraine for defending the port city of Mariupol last year during an 80-day Russian siege before surrendering as prisoners of war, have been given a hero’s welcome after returning home.
The men appeared late Saturday with President Volodymyr Zelensky before crowds in the western city of Lviv after returning to Ukraine from Turkey, where they had been held since September as part of a prisoner exchange with Russia. Denys Prokopenko, one of the returned commanders, said the released fighters were following a video posted on Twitter by local news media.
“We will definitely have our say in the battle,” Mr. Prokopenko, the regiment’s commander, told reporters in Lviv. When asked if he would fight on the front lines, he replied, “That’s why we returned to Ukraine.”
Moscow reacted angrily to the news that the Azov fighters had returned to Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov accused Turkey of breaking an agreement to keep the men on its territory until the end of the war in Ukraine. There was no immediate comment from the Turkish authorities. The government in Kiev has not provided a public explanation of how or why the fighters were returned to Ukraine.
Mr Peskov claimed the decision was linked to what he said was Ukraine’s failure in a counter-offensive that began last month. Ukraine has claimed it is making small but steady gains in its grueling campaign to reclaim territory in the south and east of the country. But Mr Peskov said Turkey had been pressured by fellow NATO members to allow the Ukrainians to return home to divert attention from the tentative attempt to reclaim territory. He offered no evidence for his claims.
Russian troops ravaged Mariupol before capturing it, but the Azov fighters then held out for weeks in the city’s massive Azovstal steel mill, living in underground bunkers under relentless bombardment. They surrendered on May 20 by order of the Kiev government. Yet their resistance made them a symbol of the country’s military resistance and many Ukrainians saw their return as an urgent national priority. Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly promised to secure the release of all Ukrainian prisoners of war.
The Azov fighters are vilified in Russia, and the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has long tried to use the far-right origins of the Azov regiment as proof of its false claim that the Ukrainian state is infested with Nazism.
The men were in Turkey under a deal announced in September to free 215 Ukrainian prisoners of war in exchange for the release of Viktor Medvedchuk, a wealthy Ukrainian businessman and close friend of Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin, and 54 other Russian prisoners of war. It was not clear how many members of the Azov battalion are still imprisoned.
Mr Zelensky visited Ankara on Friday and Saturday for talks with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of a major NATO summit in Lithuania starting next week, where Ukraine’s fledgling application for alliance membership will be high on the agenda. to stand. Turkey has resisted the Russian invasion and Mr Erdogan has expressed his support for Ukraine’s application for NATO membership, but he has also tried to maintain a close relationship with Mr Putin.
The Azov fighters returned home on the 500th day since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many Ukrainians see that date as both a moment to reflect on the death and destruction the country has faced, but also as the beginning of a new phase of heroic resistance against Moscow.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda met Mr Zelensky on Sunday during a visit to the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk, where they attended a church service commemorating the massacres of Poland by Ukrainian nationalists during World War II. Poland, another NATO member, is one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters.
Ukraine seemed to confirm that its forces were behind an explosion in October that destroyed part of the bridge across the Kerch Strait connecting Russia to the Crimea peninsula in one of the most spectacular attacks on Moscow’s interests since the beginning of the large-scale invasion.
While Ukrainians celebrated the attack on the bridge as a humiliation for Putin, who had taken personal pride in building it, the Kiev government had not officially claimed it. But on Saturday, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister Hanna Malyar cited the explosion as one of the country’s achievements in the 500 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. Responding to the post, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said the government in Kiev was a “terrorist regime”.
Paul Son reporting contributed.