The last time that Nataliia Zarytska heard her husband’s voice was on May 17 when he phoned to tell her he and his fellow soldiers had been ordered to surrender to the Russians.
He was among the last surviving defenders of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, the last bastion of Ukrainian defence against the Russian siege of the city.
Her husband called Zarytska every day with accounts of the deteriorating situation inside their subterranean refuge, until the order to surrender came. Since then, silence.
Now the mobile phone number that he called her has become the key contact for a new pressure group, Women of Steel, formed by the wives, mothers and sisters of the men taken prisoner by the Russians, demanding action from the Ukrainian government and the world to ensure that their missing men are accounted for and treated according to the international conventions of war.
“Ukrainian women are not born from steel,” she told a press conference in Kyiv last week to launch the group. “We steel ourselves, while waiting for the defenders of our homelands. We fight shoulder to shoulder with them when we fight for their life and their freedom.”
In a country united behind President Zelensky since the Russian invasion the Women of Steel members have been a rare voice of dissent, travelling abroad during the siege of Azovstal to plead their case with leaders from the Pope to Turkey’s President Erdogan for their men to be evacuated.
Their formation as a political force echoes the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, one of the few voices of dissent left in the country capable of organising pressure on President Putin. “We were asked to stay silent in order not to make things worse,” Tetyana Horko, the sister of Serhiy Horko, a Ukrainian marine commander said. “But one mustn’t think that the story of the Azovstal heroes is over. They need support, they need to be brought back home.”
The Geneva Conventions dictate strict rules for the treatment of prisoners of war, including the right for the Red Cross to visit them and convey communications with their families. The only contact that the women have had with the Red Cross is confirmation that the men walked out of Azovstal alive and were taken to Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine. Whether they remain there or were taken across the border to Russia, where an unknown number of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are believed to have been forcibly moved, is a mystery.
“I was informed that it has been registered that he left the Azovstal plant but none of my questions — whether he is still alive, what condition he is in, where they have been taken — have been answered,” Zarytska said.
Sandra Krotevich, the sister of the Azov regiment’s first deputy commander, Bohdan Krotevich, said that relatives had no idea what was happening to the detained fighters. “Where they are, what’s happening to them, in what condition they are, we do not know,” she said. She urged Russia “to treat them with the Geneva Convention, in accordance with the international law just like Ukraine treats the Russian prisoners of war.”
Ukraine, however, has itself breached those conventions by putting Russian soldiers in front of the cameras in press conferences and interviews. It has sought to distinguish its treatment of prisoners by setting up a hotline for relatives who can call to find out their fate. Parents of Russian soldiers have spoken out against the forced deployment of their conscripted sons to the Ukrainian battlefield while Moscow is accused of hiding casualty figures and failing to inform families of the deaths of their loved ones in battle.
The Red Cross has been silent about its unsuccessful efforts to access the Ukrainians who surrendered at Mariupol, said by Russia to number 2,500. Their fate was brought up in a phone call between President Macron of France, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, and Putin, when the European leaders pressed for a prisoner swap.
The call has attracted controversy over a perception that European leaders are pushing for Ukraine to make concessions to Russia to end the war, something that Kyiv has said it will not do.
Many of those who made their last stand at Azovstal belong to the Azov Battalion, a former right-wing militia that is now part of the Ukrainian military. The Kremlin has used the battalion as evidence for its claim that Ukraine is led by neo-Nazis.
Russian politicians have suggested the captured men be put on trial, prompting Ukraine into a pre-emptive move to try Russian soldiers for war crimes, with the first convictions last week. The women fear that their husbands’ and brothers’ lives are part of a political battle for control of the narrative over the rights and wrongs of the war.
“Our boys were defending their country and this talk of Nazism is nothing but Russian propaganda,” Zarytska said. “Obviously the Ukrainian government has to do something but also the whole world has to do something about this. It’s actually the responsibility of the whole world, it’s not about war any more. It’s about the value of life.”
