Last Stand at Azovstal: Inside the Siege That Shaped the Ukraine War
“We locked eyes,” he said. “There was unbelievable happiness.”

Along with the other women in her unit, Ms. Polyakova had been told to stand down on the third day of the war, as the shelling in Mariupol intensified. She hid in the basement of the couple’s apartment building until it was hit by a shell and burned to the ground.

Then she had fled the city on foot.

She made it as far as the outskirts when she was arrested at a checkpoint manned by Russian forces. They had searched her phone, discovered that she was the wife of an Azov soldier and taken her into custody. They called her a fascist and made her sing the Russian national anthem. They told her that her husband was most likely dead.

“Azov fighters are not taken prisoner,” she said they told her. “They are shot on sight.”

She alone from her prison camp was selected as part of the same trade that freed her husband. Ukrainian officials had pressed for their release for the sake of their children, who had been left in the care of an ailing grandmother.

“When I saw him, I simply — I’m even crying now,” she said.

Today, the other surviving soldiers from Azovstal are being held at a prison camp in a Russia-controlled part of eastern Ukraine. The commanders, including Captain Palamar, were transferred to Russia and are being held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a place of torture during Stalin’s purges.

Ukraine’s leaders have vowed to bring them back alive, but Russian officials are threatening to charge some of them with war crimes. Of the dead, so far the bodies of more than 400 soldiers have been returned to Ukrainian-held territory for burial.

An unknown number remain entombed in the ruins of Azovstal.