VATICAN CITY — The wives of two of the last remaining Ukrainian fighters holed up in Mariupol’s steelworks asked Pope Francis on Wednesday to help get soldiers to a third country, with one telling him: “please don’t let them die.”Kateryna Prokopenko, 27, and Yuliya Fedosiuk, 29, spoke to the pope for about five minutes at the end of his general audience in St. Peter’s Square, also asking him to intervene directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin to let them go because “Russian captivity is not an option.”Mariupol, a port on the Sea of Azov, has endured the most destructive fighting of the war in Ukraine. Kyiv says it is likely that tens of thousands of people have been killed there since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, and the Azovstal steel plant is the last part of the city still held by Ukrainian fighters.
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