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| Photo Credit: AP. |
Russian authorities Friday freed a Ukrainian medic who was taken captive for filming Mariupol’s carnage and other atrocities by Russian forces in the area. Her release comes more than three months after she was captured on the streets of Mariupol, AP reports.
Yuliia
Paievska recorded 256 gigabytes of her team’s effort over a period of two weeks
to save the wounded including Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.
She later
transferred the clips to an Associated Press team, the last remaining
international journalists in Mariupol. They took the clips of the city. On March 16 Yuliia who is also known as Taira
and a colleague were arrested by Russian forces, the same day a Russian
airstrike hit a theater in the city center, killing around 600 people,
according to 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, told The Associated Press late
Friday, breathing deeply to contain his emotion.
The clip was
later released by the Associated Press after speaking with her husband which
had millions of viewers in both United States and Europe. According to the clips,
Taira was trying to save both Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians.
On Friday Ukrainian
President Volodymir Zelenskyy said in a national address that Taira had been released.
“I’m
grateful to everyone who worked for this result. Taira is already home. We will
keep working to free everyone,” he said, according to The Associated Press.
Taira is
obviously not the first person to be kidnapped by the invading Russian forces.
Scores of prominent Ukrainians including local officials, journalists and
activists have also been captured.
Initially
Russia said Taira worked for the nationalist Azov Battalion in order to justify
its narrative that it wants to “denazify” Ukraine, a claim which could not be
substantiated by the Russians.
According to
the clip recorded on March 10, two Russian soldiers were taken roughly out of
an ambulance by a Ukrainian soldier, one on a wheelchair while the other is on
his knees, hands bound behind his back, with an obvious leg injury, according
to The Associated Press.
A Ukrainian
soldier curses at one of them. “Calm down, calm down,” Taira tells him,
according to The Associated Press.
A woman 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.”
Before her
kidnap, Taira was a member of the Ukraine Invictus Games for military veterans
and was set to compete in archery and swimming. In 2021 she received a body
camera to film for a Netflix documentary series on inspirational figures being
produced by Britain’s Prince Harry, who founded the Invictus Games, according
to The Associated Press. Invictus reportedly said Taira was a military medic
from 2018 to 2020 but had since been demobilized.
She later
used the body camera to film footages of injured civilians and Russian soldiers
as she provided medical help to them.