The Last Defenders of Mariupol Held Out in This Steel Plant

Azovstal is an eleven-square-kilometer forest of blast furnaces, coking ovens, rolling mills, and rail sidings on the east bank of the Kalmius River in Mariupol.

Built in the 1930s and rebuilt after the last world war, the plant sits on a warren of reinforced concrete tunnels and bunkers designed to keep a wartime industry running under bombardment.

In late April 2022, after seven weeks of Russian assault on Mariupol, roughly two thousand five hundred Ukrainian troops and civilians took shelter in those tunnels.

They were the last organized Ukrainian force in the city.

The defenders were a mixed force.

The core was the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard, led by Lieutenant Colonel Denys Prokopenko, with the 36th Separate Marine Brigade under Major Serhiy Volyna, elements of the 12th Operative Brigade of the National Guard, Ukrainian border guards, and the Mariupol police.

A hundred to two hundred civilians, mostly the families of plant workers, sheltered with them in the deepest levels.

Russian and separatist forces surrounded the plant in April, cut its water and power, and began a bombing campaign that included bunker-busting FAB-3000 munitions dropped from Tu-22M3 bombers.

The garrison had no resupply and no evacuation route.

It held for another five weeks anyway.

On May 3 and 4, a coordinated UN and International Committee of the Red Cross convoy evacuated more than a hundred civilians from Azovstal to Ukrainian-held territory, the first successful humanitarian corridor from the plant.

The wounded soldiers began evacuating on May 16 under an agreement negotiated by Turkey and the ICRC.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking that evening, said the combat mission of the Mariupol garrison was complete and ordered the remaining fighters to preserve their lives.

Between May 16 and May 20, 2,439 Ukrainian defenders walked out of the plant and into Russian captivity.

Some were exchanged in prisoner swaps through the following years, including Prokopenko, Volyna, and other senior officers returned in a September 2022 exchange brokered by Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Others died in captivity, including at Olenivka in July 2022.

Roughly 850 Azovstal defenders remained in Russian prisons at the time of this writing.

Mariupol is occupied.

The plant is a ruin, its coking ovens cold.

But the eighty-two days of defense at Azovstal held down significant Russian combat power at the moment Kyiv needed the enemy stretched, and that arithmetic is now part of the way the war is taught.