Ukraine still hopes for an exchange to free the fighters who were taken from the "Azovstal" compound in Mariupol from the Russian sphere of influence.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyj said in a video message on Wednesday night that he had spoken to his French colleague Emmanuel Macron “about the evacuation of our heroes from Azovstal.

The evacuation mission is ongoing.” International mediators are involved.

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

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Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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The Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday released images showing Ukrainian militants exiting the Azovstal compound.

They are soldiers, National Guardsmen, border guards and others, including women.

In addition, Moscow announced that a total of 959 defenders of "Azovstal" had surrendered since Monday.

80 of them were wounded, 51 of them seriously.

The latter would be treated in a hospital in Novoazovsk on the premises of the "Donetsk People's Republic" (DNR).

Senior Ukrainian commanders apparently still at work

The remaining Ukrainians will be taken by bus to a former penal colony in the village of Olenivka, which is also on the territory claimed by the separatist entity, according to Reuters news agency.

Denis Pushilin, the "head" of the DNR, said that the highest-ranking Ukrainian commanders have not yet left the "Azovstal" compound.

One of the Ukrainian commanders there, Illja Samojlenko, had said in a conversation with the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévi that all civilians had now left the steelworks.

The conversation was published by the Kiev portal NV.ua on Wednesday.

“Now our hands are free for the fight.

We all face death.

But our lives have no meaning.

Only Ukraine matters.

For that we have to hold the fort.

And then die.

Our role is historic," said Samoylenko in the interview.

Hundreds of people died in the steel mill.

Their corpses were said goodbye with a ceremony and housed in a large cold room in the basement of the steelworks.

DNR boss Puschilin has indicated that the steelworks will not be rebuilt after the war, but may be converted into a "technopark".

Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of Azovstal and other companies "wholly or partially destroyed" by Russia, said he would seek compensation from Moscow.

Akhmetov is Ukraine's largest businessman and "oligarch".

Beware of "dehumanization" of captured fighters

In Russia, meanwhile, a campaign is underway to try the Ukrainian fighters from Mariupol as "war criminals" or "Nazi criminals".

The Chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, suggested excluding the “exchange of Nazi criminals”.

MP Leonid Slutsky called for the death penalty to be imposed on "breastless people" whose guilt of "monstrous crimes" is proven.

The background is a campaign that began in 2014 to portray Ukrainian fighters and especially those of the Azov regiment of the National Guard, which emerged from a volunteer battalion, as revenants of the National Socialists.

Amnesty International human rights defenders highlighted that the regiment's fighters had been "objects of dehumanization by Russian state media" and were "portrayed as 'neo-Nazis' throughout the aggressive war," raising "serious concerns" about their fate as prisoners of war ' evoke.

Amnesty noted that it had previously documented "mass killings of prisoners" by the separatists and extrajudicial killings of Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces.

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, declined to comment on Pushilin's move to create a tribunal for "Nazi criminals" and try other Ukrainian soldiers before military courts.

However, the Russian investigative committee said that the fighters from the Azovstal compound were being interrogated "in the framework of investigating criminal cases into crimes committed by the Ukrainian regime against the civilian population of Donbass".

Kyiv speaks of “evacuations”, Moscow of “surrendering”

Contrary to Kyiv's rhetoric of speaking of "evacuations" from the "Azovstal" compound, Peskov said the soldiers who were holed up there "lay down their arms and surrender."

So far, Russia has not indicated that it wants to respond to Ukrainian hopes for an exchange of prisoners.

The Moscow Ministry of Defense does not give any figures on its own soldiers who have been taken prisoner by Ukraine.

In Kyiv, meanwhile, in the first Ukrainian trial against a Russian soldier for alleged war crimes, the accused Vadim Shishimarin admitted his guilt on Wednesday.

A supervisor ordered the 21-year-old tanker to shoot an elderly Ukrainian on the street, allegedly out of concern that he might reveal the troop's location to the Ukrainians.

Shishimarin fired a volley of rifles at the man.

Later he was taken prisoner by the Ukrainians.