Azov wives: ‘Every goodbye could be the last goodbye – we are always ready to learn that they are dead’

In the warren of nuclear-proof tunnels in the vast Azovstal iron and steelworks in Mariupol, an almost pathetic grinding sound could be heard. There, amid the foetid smell of rotting, gangrenous wounds, hundreds of Ukraine’s most committed fighters – Azov regiment men shelled, cut off and besieged by Russian forces – are eking out the last of their supplies.

“I spoke to Dmytro last night,” says Hanna Naumenko, 25, fiancee of Dmytro Danilov, 29. The connection was terrible, so the couple communicated by text. “He wrote they only had a little rice left, and were trying to make a kind of flour.” The fighters had rigged up an old coffee grinder to blend the rice into a paste which could be divided up among them, like the rations doled out 230 years ago by Captain Bligh to his small band of men set adrift from the Bounty.

Yet unlike the news of Bligh’s survival against the odds, which took months to reach civilisation, the Azovstal siege is being played out in real time to a global audience.

Even so, say the wives of several of the men, facing either starvation or obliteration, it is impossible to understand what they are going through. With the aim of shocking the world into pressuring Vladimir Putin to guarantee their menfolk safe passage, they have made it their mission to change that.

Currently on a tour of Europe, the women this week spoke to Pope Francis on Wednesday, hoping he might intervene. “He said he wanted to prepare a [humanitarian] corridor for Azovstal, but Putin doesn’t want to let [the soldiers] go,” says Yuliia Fedosiuk, whose husband Arseniy Fedosiuk, 29, is an Azov sergeant. Now in Paris, they hope to visit Britain to ask Boris Johnson for help too, but have yet to secure visas.

“I spoke to my husband last night,” says Kateryna Prokopenko, married to Lieutenant Colonel Denis Prokopenko, 30. “He said he’d eaten only once and had only one glass of technical water.” Technical water, used in industry, is not generally considered fit for human consumption. “They are out of food, they are out of water,” she adds. “He is exhausted. He is speaking very slowly.”

Olga Andrianova, 31, speaks only rarely to her husband Serhiy, 26. “He is wounded,” she says. “He told me they’re out of medicine. The guys are dying because they don’t have the right medical help. Their wounds are beginning to rot more and more.” Serhiy was lucky. His feet were hit, but one of the medics was able to save them. “They did not have to amputate, thank God,” Olga says. But there are no painkillers. “They’re just lying down using their own internal will. This is how they hold on.”

In a modern, hi-tech conflict, characterised by intelligence-led drone strikes, theirs is a battleground from the history books. “It’s weird. It’s not a war,” says Hanna. In the Azovstal warren there are few direct clashes with opposing troops. Instead the Azov fighters are being starved and shelled. “It’s a siege,” says Hanna. “In fact I would say it’s just murder.”

Of course nobody knows better than Russians, upon whose psyche the Nazi blockade of Leningrad remains etched, the awful realities of siege warfare. Now they are inflicting the same pitiless constriction once visited upon them on their desperate enemies.

The Azov are a hardcore band of ultra-nationalist militia fighters initially assembled in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and since regularised. The women insist any legacy of far-Right extremism has been purged from the ranks.  

“Our husbands are simple people, patriots, not Neo Nazis,” says Yuliia. “They love their country and fight for our common values.”

Yet in describing their men, these women find themselves letting slip not common values but how different they are to their country folk. They are themselves different, youthful in looks yet aged in manner, hardened by a war, which for them, they make clear, has been going on not for eight weeks but for eight years, since the Crimean attack.  

“For many Ukrainians, it was ‘wow’ the war has started,” says Yuliia. “But we have been fighting that war since 2014.” That’s why they, like Putin, don’t talk about February’s invasion as a war. They merely regard it as “an escalation”.

And if they criticise some Ukrainians for complacency, they blame others for outright treachery.

“The Azov were ready to be surrounded but hoped Ukrainian armed forces in cities close to Mariupol would stand firm. That didn’t happen,” says Yuliia. “They let the Russian army grab the cities around Mariupol.” She even suggests Volodymyr Baranyuk, commander of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade in Mariupol, “had close contacts with Russians”. Baranyuk was initially reported to have led a daring attempt to break the siege in April, but says Yuliia, the reality was “he turned out to be a traitor and went into Russian captivity even when marines still had weapons to fight.”

Nothing could be less honourable for the desperados of the Azov regiment. “They will fight, fight to the end and they will die there,” says Yuliia. There is no prospect of mercy, she says: “Every Azov soldier who surrendered during the last eight years was tortured and killed.” A month ago, she says, one soldier was taken prisoner. “The Russians made propaganda videos with him and then they tortured him and killed him and took a photo of his dead body and sent to his mother. That’s why the whole world must understand that captivity is not an option for the Azov regiment.”

Not that these women are downhearted. In fact, they seem astonishingly upbeat. They have a plan, a notion that despite the ferocity of the hatred that burns between Russia and the Azov, a deal can be brokered to extract their soldiers and keep them in a third country until the end of the war. Could Britain be that country?

“We think yes,” says Yuliia. “But the problem is that Putin hates Britain. Great Britain is the closest friend of Ukraine right now.” So the women think Turkey, or China, is a more likely destination. They still insist their husband’s chances are “very high”.

But surely, I observe, the Azov are Ukraine’s fiercest fighters. Putin will never let them go and risk them returning to the battlefield. Bizarrely, the women’s faces light up at what this implies. Even so, they cannot conceal their pride at their men’s defiance, though it must mean their deaths.

“When I’m exhausted I think of the conditions they are enduring,” says Hanna. “I know I need the strength to do everything possible to help them get free.”

None of the four women, their faces etched with worry and determination, has any doubt of the fate of their nation.

“We will have our whole country, independent, even Crimea, even the Donbas,” says Yuliia. “It can be done in one year or 10 years but we are ready to fight for our whole lives.”

Even, I hardly dare ask, if that means the lives of those most precious to them, beneath the steel works of Mariupol, might soon be coming to an end?

“Each time the wife of an [Azov] fighter says goodbye to him, it is the last goodbye,” says Yuliia. “Because we are always ready to learn that they are dead.”