Russia frees the doctor who made it possible for the whole world to know the horror of Mariupol

Yuliia Paievska, a celebrated Ukrainian doctor whose images of the besieged city of Mariupol were released to the world by an Associated Press team, was freed by Russian forces on Friday, three months after being captured on the city's streets.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
24 June 2022 Friday 12:18
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Russia frees the doctor who made it possible for the whole world to know the horror of Mariupol

Yuliia Paievska, a celebrated Ukrainian doctor whose images of the besieged city of Mariupol were released to the world by an Associated Press team, was freed by Russian forces on Friday, three months after being captured on the city's streets.

Paievska, known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she chose in the video game World of Warcraft, used a body camera to record 256 gigabytes of her team's efforts over two weeks to save the wounded, including Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.

The doctor transferred the images to an Associated Press team, the last international journalists in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, one of whom fled with them embedded in a tampon on March 15.

Taira and a colleague were taken prisoner by Russian forces on March 16, the same day a Russian airstrike hit a theater in the city center, killing about 600 people, according to the Associated.

"It was a great sense of relief," her husband, Vadim Puzanov, told the US news agency on Friday night, taking a deep breath to contain his emotion. Puzanov said he spoke by phone with Taira, who was on his way to a hospital. Kyiv and feared for his health.Initially, the family kept silent, hoping that the negotiations would continue.

But The Associated Press spoke to him before publishing the bootleg videos, which eventually had millions of viewers around the world, including on some of the biggest networks in Europe and the United States. Puzanov expressed his gratitude for the coverage, which showed that Taira was trying to save Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Taira's release in a national address. “I am grateful to everyone who worked for this result. Taira is already at home. We will continue to work to free everyone,” he said.

Hundreds of prominent Ukrainians have been kidnapped or captured, including local officials, journalists, activists and human rights defenders. Russia portrayed Taira as working for the nationalist Azov battalion, in line with Moscow's narrative, which is attempting to "denazify" Ukraine.

But the AP found no such evidence, and friends and colleagues said he had no links to Azov, which made a last stand at a Mariupol steel plant before hundreds of its fighters were captured or killed.

The video itself is a visceral testament to their efforts to save the wounded on both sides. A video recorded on March 10 shows two Russian soldiers being roughly pulled out of an ambulance by a Ukrainian soldier. One is in a wheelchair. The other is on his knees, his hands tied behind his back, with an obvious wound on his leg. His eyes are covered by winter hats and he wears white armbands.

A Ukrainian soldier curses one of them. "Calm down, calm down," Taira tells him. A woman asks him: "Are you going to treat the Russians?" "They won't be so nice to us," she replies. “But I couldn't do anything else. They are prisoners of war." Taira was a member of the Ukraine Invictus Games for military veterans, where she would compete in archery and swimming.

Invictus said she was a military doctor from 2018 to 2020, but had since been demobilized. She received the body camera in 2021 to film a Netflix documentary series on inspirational figures produced by Britain's Prince Harry, who founded the Invictus Games. But when Russian forces invaded, he used it to film scenes of wounded civilians and soldiers.