How not to level up parliament

Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might happen next. The day before the news broke, I was talking on WhatsApp to Daniel Detcom, a Ukrainian territorial reservist (in normal life, a disc jockey), currently on active service in Mykolaiv. He told me that the Azovstal issue was producing disagreement among Ukrainians. Those fighting in the steel plant were mostly more nationalist than President Zelensky. Some people suspected him of not striving hard enough to help them, because they might be better for him as ‘dead heroes’ than as active participants in a future Ukraine. It may be to try to refute this idea that Zelensky is insisting, in his public remarks, that dead heroes are exactly what he does not want. Now the issue is: what will happen to those released? We are being invited to trust the UN and the Red Cross; but the fighters who have come out of Azovstal are being held by the Russians, who make no distinction between prisoners of war and hostages.