The commander of the 1st battalion of the Ukrainian Azov regiment, Oleg Mudrak, who participated in the defense of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol and spent several months in Russian captivity, has died. Mudrak’s death was announced on Instagram by his nephew.
According to Channel 24, the cause of death of 35-year-old Mudrak was cardiac arrest.
Mudrak has been fighting for Ukraine since 2014. After a full-scale Russian invasion, he defended Mariupol. In the spring of 2022, the fighters of the Azov regiment held the defense at the Azovstal plant for almost two months. In mid-May, by order of the command, they left the territory of the plant and surrendered. According to the Russian side, almost 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers surrendered in total. The same figure was called by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.
In September, as part of a large-scale prisoner exchange, Russia released five Azovstal defense commanders and 108 Azov regiment fighters. Mudrak was among those released.
The prisoners, including Mudrak, were kept in a penal colony in the village of Yelenovka in the Donetsk region. As a result of explosions on the territory of the facility on July 29, according to the Russian side, at least 53 people were killed. Russia blamed the Ukrainian army for the incident. Moscow claims that a missile attack was carried out on the colony. In Kyiv, they say that there was no attack by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the explosions were supposed to hide the massacres and torture of Ukrainian prisoners.
Mudrak became widely known after the writer Stanislav Aseev published a photo of the fighter in August, which showed how much he had changed in a hundred days in captivity.
- The parties to the war in Ukraine accuse each other of mistreating prisoners of war. A UN report released in November notes that both Ukrainian and Russian prisoners report ill-treatment.
- The Azov Regiment was created in 2014 as a volunteer formation, its origins were activists of the extreme right. In 2015, the U.S. Congress barred him from providing military assistance due to alleged links to neo-Nazis.
- Now “Azov” is an integral part of the armed forces of Ukraine.
- On August 2, the Russian Supreme Court recognized the Ukrainian Azov Regiment as a terrorist organization and banned it.
- “Azov” is regularly used by Russian propaganda to prove support for neo-Nazism by Ukraine at the state level. Moscow called the “denazification” of Ukraine one of the goals of the military invasion in 2022. Polk denies any connection to Nazism.
