From Tass.com:

 Ukraine’s current regime apparently hopes that its proposal for exchanging the leader of the Opposition Platform – For Life party, Viktor Mevdedchuk, will help secure the release of the high-ranking foreign military specialists, who according to certain evidence, are trapped on the premises of the iron and steel works Azovstal in Mariupol, the deputy director of the CIS Countries Institute, Vladimir Zharikhin, told TASS on Wednesday.

The analyst doubts that the real purpose of Kiev’s proposal for exchanging Medvedchuk for all remaining militants of the Azov battalion is to save small fry.

“All this fuss is not about the rank-and-file, who in fact have already been written off. In focus there are very concrete people. The attempts to evacuate them have already resulted in the loss of eight helicopters. Four ships were dispatched to Mariupol for the same purpose to no avail. Lastly, there was a breakout attempt, in which the encircled group sustained heavy casualties. Apparently, Medvedchuk, or the person whom they present as Medvedchuk, is their last attempt to achieve the release of the high-ranking foreign nationals. May they say first who are the ones they want to be exchanged,” Zharikhin said.

He speculated that if the man proposed for an exchange is really Medvedchuk, then the Ukrainian special services might have seized him a long time ago and kept in custody just in case, as the last resort.

“Now it’s precisely this type of extreme situation. The question arises who are these very important people for whose sake they (the Ukrainian authorities – TASS) are ready to use their last resource,” Zharikhin wonders.

DPR and Russian troops have intercepted radio communications in at least 6 European languages that indicate that officers, of at least the rank of colonel, from different NATO member states are trapped within Azovstal. This raises serious issues. It is one thing to advise the Ukrainian military in peace-time. It is another thing to be a combatant in war. That violates the NATO charter in several ways, as other members were not informed. Their last chance of being exfiltrated was over on April 5 and now it is only a matter of waiting for the operation to end, probably in a couple of days.

There are said to be 3000 nationalists and Ukrainian armed forces, as well as scientists working in the biolabs, in addition to high-ranking officers from US, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Greece, Turkey and Italy.