“I am deeply convinced that the army is a deep teamwork, and from today we are with you, we continue the fight, we will definitely say our word in battle, and the most important thing for today is that the Ukrainian army seized the strategic initiative on the front line and every day we move forward, destroy the enemy, liberate the temporarily occupied territories,” Radis said.
According to him, they will do “everything possible and impossible to speed up this process and for the war to come to its logical conclusion.”
The words of the Azov commander were also confirmed by Prokopenko’s deputy Svyatoslav Palamar, who returned from Turkey to Ukraine.
“We have returned, and we will continue to do our job. We are the military, we took the oath,” the defender of Mariupol stressed.
In addition to them, on July 8, they also arrived in Ukraine from Turkey. Sergei Volynsky, Commander of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade, Oleg Khomenko, Commander of the Azov Company, and Denis Shleg, Commander of the 12th Operational Brigade named after Dmitry Vishnevetsky.
Context:
The defense of Mariupol continued from February to May 2022. Until mid-May, Ukrainian defenders were at the Azovstal plant – fighters of the National Guard, including the Azov regiment, SBU officers, military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, border guards and policemen. By that time, the occupiers had captured almost the entire territory of Mariupol and regularly stormed Azovstal, fired at the enterprise and dropped aerial bombs on it.
On May 16, President Volodymyr Zelensky and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced that the evacuation of Ukrainian servicemen, including seriously wounded, had begun from Azovstal. According to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, about 2.5 thousand defenders left Azovstal, as of the end of May 2023, more than 500 of them returned from Russian captivity. The invaders still hold about 700 Azov residents, reported in the division.
Prokopenko, Palamar, Volynsky, Shlega and Khomenko were released from Russian captivity in September 2022. The commanders of the Mariupol garrison were exchanged in Ankara.
Zelensky said that, according to the agreements, they were supposed to remain in Turkey until the end of the war – under the protectorate of the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the head of military intelligence of Ukraine Kirill Budanov, they lived “in a private house in decent conditions.”
After the return of the commanders of the defenders of Mariupol from Turkey to Ukraine, the press secretary of the president of the aggressor country of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Peskov, called the return of the defenders of Mariupol to Ukraine a violation by Kiev and Ankara and complained that “no one informed Russia” about the return of the Ukrainians.
2023-07-08 20:36:04
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