KYIV (Reuters) – As Ukrainian fighters left the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol this week and ended their dramatic final stand towards Russia’s siege, Mariia Zimareva tried in useless to identify her husband amid the flood of reports photos being printed.

The 19-year-old, who’s 5 months pregnant, discovered from her 22-year-old husband’s unit on Wednesday that he was on a listing of troopers who had been taken from the steelworks to the Russian-controlled city of Olenivka close to the regional capital Donetsk.

Uncertainty now swirls over the destiny of the fighters, who Kyiv needs returned in a prisoner swap. Some senior Russian lawmakers have demanded that among the troopers be placed on trial.

“I used to be frightened earlier than as properly, so nothing actually has modified,” Zimareva mentioned in a web based interview from the house of her husband’s dad and mom the place she has been residing – in Znamianka within the central Ukrainian area of Kirovohrad.

“I have not had a single day of calm for the reason that first day of the struggle,” she mentioned.

Her husband, Stanislav Zimarev, a soldier for the National Guard who works in an armoured personnel provider unit, was deployed to Mariupol, the town devastated by Russia, on Feb. 7 only a few weeks earlier than the invasion started.

Zimareva mentioned he was wounded by a bit of shrapnel in early April that tore into his hip. He was taken to and operated on at a hospital in a bunker within the hulking Azovstal steelworks that went on to grow to be the final redoubt for the town’s fighters.

The couple had been final in contact immediately on April 20, she mentioned, although he was in a position to get a message out to her by way of one other fighter a couple of weeks in the past.

She is now banking on her husband and all of the fighters being handed over in a jail swap. She dismissed discuss in Moscow of trials for the troopers as propaganda aimed toward a home viewers.

“I feel they may swap everybody, even the Azov (fighters). What they’re saying about placing them on trial, I feel it is simply Russian propaganda for Russian residents to justify having allow them to out of there,” she mentioned.

This referred to fighters in Mariupol from the Azov Regiment. Moscow calls the Azov Regiment “Nazis”. The unit, fashioned in 2014 as a militia to struggle Russian-backed separatists, denies being fascist, and Ukraine says it has been reformed from its radical nationalist origins.

Zimareva and her husband expect a daughter, she mentioned, however they do not have a reputation but.

“I hope he’ll be again by that point and we are able to select one collectively,” she mentioned.

(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Frances Kerry)