We didn’t want to surrender from Azovstal, we only planned to evacuate wounded and dead, - "Azov" deputy commander Palamar
The deputy commander of the "Azov" regiment, Sviatoslav Palamar, said that the Russians had given an ultimatum to the soldiers when they were leaving "Azovstal".
He said this in an interview with journalist Dmytro Gordon, Censor.NET reports.
"There was no decision to withdraw from Azovstal. We wanted to fight, we wanted to fight to the last. And Denys (Prokopenko, commander of the 1st Corps of the 'Azov' National Guard - Ed.) told the Russians that we would not give up. The priority of conversations with the Russians was the same: the wounded, the seriously wounded, 300 of them, they were dying. We had to evacuate them. And the dead bodies, the bodies of our soldiers who died. And we would have stayed, we would have continued to fight," Palamar said.
According to him, no one agreed with the Russians that Azovstal's defenders would withdraw.
"We did not want to surrender. This is important... We talked about handing over the wounded and killed, as well as non-combatants - women and doctors. But the Russians said: ‘No, either all or none’. They understood that if we got this painful moral trauma off our shoulders, we would either continue to fight with them for a long time," the defender added.
