“The only thing that can be said is that the Ukrainian state is doing everything possible and impossible” to save the soldiers, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.īut Russian officials said nothing about an exchange - on the contrary, they raised the prospect that at least some of the prisoners would be treated as war criminals. The Ukrainian authorities said little about the terms of the surrender except to assert that the Ukrainian fighters were heroes and that as prisoners they would soon be exchanged for Russian prisoners held by Ukraine. Putin has called his country’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. They were transported to Russian-held territory aboard buses emblazoned with “Z” - the Russian emblem for what President Vladimir V. Still, Mariupol has been largely reduced to ruin, Ukrainian officials say that more than 20,000 inhabitants were killed, and the city has come to symbolize the war’s grotesque horrors.īy early Tuesday, many of the fighters ensconced in a warren of shelters under the Azovstal steel mill, a Soviet-era complex besieged by the Russians for weeks, had emerged and surrendered. The surrender also gave Russia’s state-run media the ingredients for claiming its side was winning. Even as Russia has struggled on other battlefronts, the surrender at Mariupol solidified one of Russia’s few significant territorial achievements - the conquest of a once-thriving southeast port.