Azovstal fighters may face trial as criminals

The last defenders of Mariupol were taken to a Russian prison colony Tuesday where they faced trial as ‘‘Nazi war criminals’’.

More than 260 fighters, some of them seriously wounded and carried on stretchers, ended weeks of resistance in the bunkers and tunnels below the Azovstal plant when the most devastating siege of Russia’s war drew to a close.

Seven buses carrying the fighters took them to a former penal colony in the Russian-controlled town of Olenivka near Donetsk, Reuters said.

The Tass news agency said the Investigative Committee of Russia, equivalent to the FBI, planned to question the soldiers, many of them members of the Azov Battalion, as part of an investigation into what Moscow calls ‘‘Ukrainian regime crimes’’.

Ukraine compared the fighters to the Spartans and said they had changed the course of the war by holding back thousands of Russian troops and giving their soldiers critical time to prepare and build defensive positions elsewhere.

The fall of Azovstal – nearly three months after the war began – allowed the complete capture of the port city by the Russians in what they will see as a big strategic success.

Hanna Maliar, a Ukrainian deputy defence minister, said the troops would be swapped in a prisoner exchange. However, some Russian officials said they should be tried or even executed.

Vyacheslav Volodin, one of Russia’s most powerful officials and speaker of the state Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, said: ‘‘Nazi criminals should not be exchanged. They are war criminals and we must do everything to bring them to justice.’’

He ordered MPs to draft a law prohibiting the swap of Azovstal troops for Russian prisoners of war.

The office of Russia’s prosecutor-general asked the Supreme Court to recognise the Azov Battalion – one of the groups defending Azovstal – as a ‘‘terrorist organisation’’, in an apparent attempt to prevent its fighters from being treated as prisoners of war.

Leonid Slutsky, a Russian MP who is one of the negotiators in talks with Ukraine, called the combatants ‘‘animals in human form’’ and said they should receive the death penalty.

In Moscow, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not answer questions about whether the Azovstal troops would be treated as war criminals or prisoners of war. President Vladimir Putin ‘‘guaranteed that they would be treated according to the relevant international laws’’, he said.

The Azov Battalion was formed in 2014 by a Ukrainian neo-Nazi, but has since expanded and is no longer exclusively an extreme-Right unit. It has attracted soldiers from all backgrounds. Nonetheless, the battalion has served as a useful propaganda tool for the Kremlin.

Ukrainian marines and the 12th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine were also among those fighting at Azovstal.

Russia’s defence ministry said 265 Ukrainian fighters from the Azovstal plant had surrendered, including 51 who were seriously wounded. Ukraine said some fighters remained trapped at the steelworks and efforts to rescue them were continuing. – The Times