Families of Azovstal fighters request Turkish president to begin the extraction

Families of Azov regiment fighters imprisoned at Mariupol’s Azovstal factory made an emotional appeal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

They urged him to “be a hero” and begin an extraction procedure for all the remaining fighters.

A father of an 18-year-old combatant encouraged Erdogan to grab “a historic opportunity to go down in history as a peacemaker, as a hero.”

Suharnikov requested that a civilian vessel be dispatched to Azovstal to fetch the fighter, citing examples from Syria and Dunkirk during World War II.

The fighter’s father also recommended that they be moved to a neutral nation far away from the fighting.

“As a man to man, a father to a father, I implore you to save my son and his comrades,” Evheniy Suharnikov pleaded.

He added, “We need a hero, a person with enough political authority to carry out this procedure. From a political and geographical perspective, we think Turkey can be that country and Erdogan can be that person.”

Families have amassed 1.5 million signatures on a petition to secure Azov fighters’ safe transit out of the factory.