War in Ukraine: in the hell of Azovstal, the pictures of the last fighters

Looking at lost, disfigured children, they look like the dead, and yet it is like a last call for life launched, this Wednesday, May 10, by a certain Dmytro Kozatsky, a member of the Azov regiment and, like his comrades, prisoner of an underground room of the Mariupol Azovstal factory. In a now ghost town, about a thousand soldiers constitute the last pocket of resistance against Russia. But the photos are there to show us that they are no longer in a state to be heroes and that they need, like hundreds of civilians a few days ago, to be evacuated urgently.

Exposing to the world the faces of sacrifice

This war could be illustrated by this young man with a swollen face but with deep blue eyes. Both bruised and determined, he stands tall despite a scarred cheek, as if marked by the iron of a sword.

“The whole civilized world must see the conditions in which the wounded and crippled defenders of Mariupol find themselves and act! We call on the United Nations and the Red Cross to show humanity and to reaffirm the fundamental principles on which you have created by rescuing the wounded who are no longer combatants”, can we read, on Telegram, in the preamble of the photos sent.

Besieged since the beginning of May and only protected by the labyrinthine structure of the factory, these men are unable to be supplied. Food is running out and the wounded cannot be properly cared for. When Dmytro Kozatsky specifies that open wounds are badly bandaged and that amputations take place in the most deplorable sanitary conditions, there is no doubt that it is these three young men that he now wants us to think of.

“That these soldiers be moved to areas under Ukrainian control where they will be assisted and properly taken care of”, such is the request, and the last hope, of the Azovstal regiment. But do these soldiers really believe it, when they know that the evacuation corridors for civilians have been so difficult to put in place. Ukraine asked, this Saturday, May 7, the NGO Doctors Without Borders to organize a mission to evacuate and treat the soldiers entrenched in the steelworks. But such an operation is now impossible because of the continued bombing.

Despair can be read particularly in certain shots, such as in this man with a dull look and who no longer seems to have the strength to stand up.

But the Azov regiment also shows, by sending these photos, that suffering is not death, and even less defeat. Thus, a Ukrainian commander who is one of the fighters besieged by Russian forces on Wednesday appealed for help to American billionaire Elon Musk, so that he intervenes to save them. “People say you’re from another planet to teach people to believe in the impossible. Where I live it’s almost impossible to survive,” Sergei Volyna, a member of the 36th Brigade, tweeted. Marines of Mariupol.

Hope and courage therefore remain, and perhaps it is this final photo that should be observed in particular. With his right arm immobilized by a makeshift splint, a man manages to smile at the camera. Above all, he draws with a black hand the “V” for victory, that of Winston Churchill, who, at the worst of the conflict with Nazi Germany, had made this gesture the symbol of resistance. Mud and tears, the soldiers of Azovstal have seen enough to deserve the hope of victory.