KYIV, Ukraine — Daria Tsykunova can’t be sure where her partner is — or if he’s still alive.
The 22-year-old last heard from Illia Samoylenko the day after he and about 2,400 other Ukrainian fighters — holed up for a month in the tunnels and bunkers of the labyrinthine Azovstal steel factory fighting in a last stand for the besieged city of Mariupol — finally surrendered to the Russians on May 16.
Around 100 of the most grievously wounded Azovstal defenders were exchanged in a prisoner swap in late June. Most of the rest — of whom about 1,000 are, like Samoylenko, members of the controversial Azov regiment — were at the Russian-controlled prisoner-of-war (POW) camp at Olenivka. There, at least 50 prisoners were killed and 75 wounded on July 29, when an explosion and fire ripped through the prisoner barracks.
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