Fighters Trapped in Azovstal Plant Will Resist, Say Final Days Like ‘Hellish Reality Show’

A Ukrainian Military Forces tank is seen in a February 2022 file photo. (Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images)

As Ukrainian authorities said that all civilians have been evacuated from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the eastern portion of the country, holdout militants said Sunday that they will continue to fight.

“All women, children, and elderly people have been evacuated from Azovstal. This part of the Mariupol humanitarian operation has been completed,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Saturday.

A trapped Ukrainian fighter told international media outlets that fighting has continued, describing the situation as a “hellish reality show” as Russia continues to bomb the plant. He called for urgent military assistance.

“It feels like I’ve landed in a hellish reality show in which us soldiers fight for our lives and the whole world watches this interesting episode,” Serhiy Volinski, the commander of the 36th marine infantry brigade, told Al Jazeera. “Pain, suffering, hunger, misery, tears, fears, death. It’s all real,” he added.

Another Ukrainian fighter associated with the Azov Battalion, which has been associated with neo-Nazi imagery and has been accused of committing war crimes, told Reuters that they will fight to the end.

“We will continue to fight as long as we are alive to repel the Russian occupiers,” Captain Sviatoslav Palamar, a deputy commander of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, told an online conference Sunday, according to Reuters. “We don’t have much time, we are coming under intense shelling,” he said.

A damaged facility of Azovstal Iron and Steel Works during Ukraine-Russia conflict in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on May 3, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Illia Samoilenko, a fighter with the Azov Regiment who also took part in the virtual conference, said they still had weapons, munitions, and water, and were prepared to fight as long as they must. “We can die at any moment... Our message is don’t waste our efforts,” Samoilenko said, calling on the Ukrainian government to rely more on continuing fighting against Russian forces than on hopes that Moscow can be pacified by negotiations.

A United Nations official told Reuters that a convoy of buses filled with people who were evacuated from the plant made it to the city of Zaporizhzhia.

On Saturday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government is working on a plan to evacuate the troops from Azovstal and secure humanitarian corridors for people stuck in nearby Mariupol, which has been targeted for weeks during the conflict.

“We are now preparing the second stage of the evacuation mission, the wounded and medics. … We are also working to evacuate our military. All heroes who defend Mariupol,” he said.

It comes as the United States and other Group of Seven countries announced Sunday that they will implement new sanctions on Russia’s economy in response to the conflict, including a tightening of export controls, penalizing state-run media, and banning Western management consulting services in the country.

Reuters contributed to this report.