Russia frees captive medic who filmed Mariupol’s horror

A celebrated Ukrainian medic whose footage was smuggled out of the besieged metropolis of Mariupol by an Associated Press crew was freed by Russian forces on Friday, three months after she was taken captive on the streets of the town.

Yuliia Paievska is thought in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she selected within the World of Warcraft online game. Using a physique digital camera, she recorded 256 gigabytes of her crew’s efforts over two weeks to save lots of the wounded, together with each Russian and Ukrainian troopers.

She transferred the clips to an Associated Press crew, the final worldwide journalists within the Ukrainian metropolis of Mariupol, one in all whom fled with it embedded in a tampon on March 15. Taira and a colleague have been taken prisoner by Russian forces on March 16, the identical day a Russian airstrike hit a theatre within the metropolis centre, killing round 600 folks, in keeping with an Associated Press investigation.

“It was such a great sense of relief. Those sound like such ordinary words, and I don’t even know what to say,” her husband, Vadim Puzanov, advised The Associated Press late Friday, respiration deeply to comprise his emotion.

Puzanov stated he spoke by telephone with Taira, who was en path to a Kyiv hospital and feared for her well being.

Initially, the household had stored quiet, hoping negotiations would take their course. But The Associated Press spoke with him earlier than releasing the smuggled movies, which finally had tens of millions of viewers world wide, together with on a few of the greatest networks in Europe and the United States.

Puzanov expressed gratitude for the protection, which confirmed Taira was attempting to save lots of Russian troopers in addition to Ukrainian civilians.

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy introduced Taira’s launch in a nationwide handle.

“I’m grateful to everyone who worked for this result. Taira is already home. We will keep working to free everyone,” he stated.

Hundreds of outstanding Ukrainians have been kidnapped or captured, together with native officers, journalists, activists and human rights defenders.

Russia portrayed Taira as working for the nationalist Azov Battalion, in step with Moscow’s narrative that it’s making an attempt to “denazify” Ukraine. But the AP discovered no such proof, and pals and colleagues stated she had no hyperlinks to Azov, which made a final stand in a Mariupol metal plant earlier than a whole lot of its fighters have been captured or killed.

The footage itself is a visceral testomony to her efforts to save lots of the wounded on each side.

A clip recorded on March 10 exhibits two Russian troopers taken roughly out of an ambulance by a Ukrainian soldier. One is in a wheelchair. The different is on his knees, arms sure behind his again, with an apparent leg damage. Their eyes are lined by winter hats, they usually put on white armbands.

A Ukrainian soldier curses at one in all them. “Calm down, calm down,” Taira tells him.

A lady asks her, “Are you going to treat the Russians?”

“They will not be as kind to us,” she replies. “But I couldn’t do otherwise. They are prisoners of war.”

Taira was a member of the Ukraine Invictus Games for navy veterans, the place she was set to compete in archery and swimming. Invictus stated she was a navy medic from 2018 to 2020 however had since been demobilized.

She acquired the physique digital camera in 2021 to movie for a Netflix documentary sequence on inspirational figures being produced by Britain’s Prince Harry, who based the Invictus Games. But when Russian forces invaded, she used it to shoot scenes of injured civilians and troopers as an alternative.