Russia said 256 Ukrainian fighters had “laid down their arms and surrendered”, including 51 severely wounded. Ukraine said 264 soldiers, including 53 wounded, had left the metal plant, and efforts were under way to evacuate others still inside.
“The ‘Mariupol’ garrison has fulfilled its combat mission,” the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement.
“The supreme military command ordered the commanders of the units stationed at Azovstal to save the lives of the personnel … Defenders of Mariupol are the heroes of our time.”
The surrender appears to mark the end of the battle of Mariupol, where Ukraine believes tens of thousands of people were killed under months of Russian bombardment and siege.
The city now lies in ruins. Its complete capture is Russia’s biggest victory of the war, giving Moscow total control of the coast of the Sea of Azov and an unbroken stretch of eastern and southern Ukraine about the size of Greece.
But it comes as Russia’s campaign has faltered elsewhere, with its troops around the city of Kharkiv in the northeast lately retreating at the fastest pace since they were driven out of the north and the area around Kyiv at the end of March.
Authorities on both sides gave few clues about the ultimate fate of Mariupol’s last defenders, with Ukrainian officials discussing the prospect of some form of exchange for Russian prisoners but giving no details.
“We hope that we will be able to save the lives of our guys,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an early morning address. “There are severely wounded ones among them. They’re receiving care. Ukraine needs Ukrainian heroes alive.”
Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said 53 injured troops from the steelworks had been taken to a hospital in Russian-controlled Novoazovsk, some 32 km (20 miles) to the east, and another 211 people were taken to the town of Olenivka, also in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
All of the evacuees would be subject to a potential prisoner exchange with Russia, she added.
Mariupol is the biggest city Russia has captured since its Feb. 24 invasion, giving Moscow a clear-cut victory for the first time in months, during which its campaign in Ukraine has mostly faced military disaster against an underestimated foe.
In a statement released late on Monday, the Azov Regiment, the Ukrainian unit that had held out in the steelworks, said it had achieved its objective over 82 days of resistance by making it possible for Ukraine to defend the rest of the country.
“In order to save lives, the entire Mariupol garrison is implementing the approved decision of the Supreme Military Command and hopes for the support of the Ukrainian people,” the Azov Regiment said in a social media post.
In an accompanying video, one of the unit’s senior commanders, Denys Prokopenko, called the decision to save the lives of his men “the highest level of overseeing troops”.
The United Nations and Red Cross say thousands of civilians died under Russia’s siege of the once prosperous port of 400,000, with the true toll uncounted but certain to be Europe’s worst since wars in Chechnya and the Balkans in the 1990s.
For months, Mariupol’s residents were forced to cower in cellars under perpetual bombardment, with no access to food, fresh water or heat and dead bodies littering the streets above. Two incidents in particular – the bombings in March of a maternity clinic and of a theatre where hundreds of people were sheltering – became worldwide emblems of Russia’s tactic of raining down devastation on population centres.
Thousands of civilians are believed to have been buried in mass graves or makeshift pits dug in gardens by their neighbours. Ukraine says Moscow sent mobile cremation trucks to erase evidence of civilian deaths, and forcibly deported thousands of residents to Russia.
Moscow denies targeting civilians or deporting them, and says it has taken in refugees. It says it is now restoring normal life to the city, part of the Donbas region it claims on behalf of separatists it has backed since 2014.