The Ukrainian soldier Mijailo Dianov in two images. The first taken on May 11, a few days before the surrender of the last Azovstal, the Mariúpol factory where the last resistance against the Russian invasion took shelter. On the right, Dianov in a photograph taken yesterday. The Ukrainian is part of a prisoner exchange brokered by Saudi Arabia: 215 Ukrainians (and some British) in exchange for Víktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian and a personal friend of Putin (he is the father of the goddaughter of the Russian president).
While in Russia the recruitment orders for hundreds of men arrived, in the Ukraine a hundred soldiers who fought in the Mariupol steelworks, before the city fell to the Russians, hugged their families after months of captivity in the territory of Russian rule. His destiny was predicted black. The Duma had demanded his head and the Supreme Court had declared the Azov regiment a terrorist organization.
Due to its ultranationalist origins in 2014, the Kremlin has based its denunciations of the existence of Nazis in Ukraine on this formation and has served as a pretext to justify its "special military operation", which aimed to "denazify" the neighboring country. Five of the regiment's senior officers are among those released, but they will have to remain on Turkish soil until the war is over.
Medvedchuk, whose Russian-speaking minority party was the second-largest force in the 2019 Ukrainian elections, was captured by Kyiv in April, a month after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's war cabinet outlawed his political force. For the president, the tycoon is nothing more than "Putin's right-hand man in Ukraine", guilty of "high treason". But he celebrated the release of two hundred men for just one.
In contrast, in Russia the news was received like a bucket of cold water. Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen leader and a rare dissenting voice with the Kremlin, said he was "extremely dissatisfied" with an exchange that he called "unacceptable." "Criminals recognized as terrorists cannot be exchanged for soldiers," he writes on his Telegram account.
The regimental exchange, which took place on the same day that Putin decreed the mobilization of at least 300,000 reservists, went unnoticed on Russian television. News and talk shows avoided the word 'Azov' when reporting the news, according to BBC analyst Francis Scarr.
At the end of May the last Azovstal fighters (more than 2,000 men and women) surrendered before the advancing Russian troops. Kyiv immediately assured that he would negotiate a prisoner exchange, but the days went by and his release seemed more and more distant. His relatives, who demonstrated for several days in the capital, did not know anything about his relatives while asking for his release.
The Russian attack on the Olenivka prison, near Donetsk, where some members of the regiment were held and where at least fifty prisoners of war died, was a serious blow to their hopes. His wives described the bombing as a "public execution".
But yesterday the eternal wait was over for many and the photos of the reunion, with their faces full of happiness and emotion, flooded the social networks of Ukraine. Several snapshots compared the before and after of these combatants, some of whom, like Dianov, were photographed by the Ukrainian photographer and soldier Dmytro Kozatskyi, alias Orest, when they resisted in the cellars of the dilapidated factory. He is also one of the released.
Still, the emotions were mixed. Some of his wives kept their joy to themselves because the stories of suffering (many were badly injured when they resisted in the steel mill) and torture carried by their husbands tormented them. "It scares me to imagine what they did to her there," Kateryna Prokopenko told Voice of America television.
