POKROVSK, Ukraine — Russia’s claim that it has seized the Mariupol steel plant, which has become a symbol of Ukrainian tenacity, provides Russian President Vladimir Putin with a much-needed triumph in the war he launched, culminating in a siege of nearly three months that left the city in ruins and more than 20,000 residents are feared dead.

After the Russian Defense Ministry announced Friday night that its forces had withdrawn the last Ukrainian fighters from the plant’s miles of underground tunnels, concern grew for the last Ukrainian defenders of the site, who are now being held, prisoner. Russian hands.

Those Ukrainians, hailed as heroes by their fellow citizens, will surely face court for their wartime actions, the head of an area of eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, Denis Pushilin, said on Saturday.

THIS IS THE END OF ALMOST THREE MONTHS OF FIGHTS IN A CITY THAT WAS DESTROYED

“A tribunal is inevitable. I think justice needs to be restored. There is a request for this from ordinary people, society, and probably the same part of the world community,” Pushilin added, quoted by the Russian state news agency Tass.

Russian authorities and state media have repeatedly tried to characterize the fighters who took refuge in the Azovstal steel plant as “neo-Nazis”.

Among the more than 2,400 defenders of the plant were members of the Azov Regiment, a National Guard unit with roots in the far right.

The Ukrainian government has not commented on the Russian claim that it did indeed capture Azovstal, which for weeks remained the last stronghold of the Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol.

With that, Moscow would have completed its long-sought goal of controlling the city, home to a strategic seaport.

The Ukrainian military told fighters holed up at the plant, hundreds of them wounded, this week that their mission was complete and they could get out. He described his removal as an evacuation, not a mass surrender.

As for the overall picture of the broader invasion in Ukraine, the impact of the declared Russian victory at Azovstal remained unclear. Many Russian troops had already been redeployed from Mariupol to other parts of the conflict, which began with the Russian invasion of its neighbor on February 24.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov reported on Saturday that Russia had destroyed a Ukrainian special operations base in the Black Sea region of Odesa, as well as a major cache of Western-supplied weapons in the Zhytomyr region. , in the north of Ukraine. There was no confirmation from Ukraine.

In its morning operational report, the Ukrainian military general staff reported heavy fighting in much of eastern Ukraine, including the Sievierodonetsk, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka areas.

Unable to approach and capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, Russia focused its offensive on the country’s eastern industrial heartland, Donbas.

Russian-backed separatists have controlled parts of the Donbas region since 2014, and Moscow wants to expand the territory under its control.

Mariupol, which is part of Donbas, was blockaded early in the war and became a terrifying example to people in other parts of the country of the starvation, terror, and death they could face if the Russians surrounded their communities.