A famous Ukrainian medic, footage of which was smuggled in from the besieged city of Mariupol by an Associated Press team, was freed by Russian forces on Friday, three months after being held captive on the city’s streets.
Yulia Pyevska is known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she chose in the World of Warcraft video game. Using a body camera, he recorded 256 gigabytes of his team’s efforts to rescue the wounded, including both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, over two weeks.
She transferred the clip to an Associated Press team, the final international journalists in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, one of whom fled on March 15 with a tampon embedded in it. Taira and an ally were taken prisoner by the Russian army on 16 March. On the same day a Russian airstrike attacked a theater in the city center, killing about 600 people, according to an Associated Press investigation.
“It was such a great sense of relief. They seem like such ordinary words, and I don’t even know what to say,” her husband, Vadim Puzanov, told the Associated Press late Friday, trying to control his emotions. Taking a deep breath.
Puzanov said he spoke on the phone with Taira, who was on her way to a hospital in Kyiv, and feared for her health.
Initially, the family remained silent, hoping that the conversation would take its course. But The Associated Press spoke to him before releasing the smuggling video, which eventually garnered millions of viewers around the world, including some of the biggest networks in Europe and the United States.
Puzanov expressed his gratitude for the coverage that showed Taira was trying to rescue Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainian civilians.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky announced Taira’s release in a national address.
“I am grateful to everyone who worked for this outcome. Taira is already home. We will keep working 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, which is in line with Moscow’s statement that it is attempting to “condemn” Ukraine. But the AP found no such evidence, and friends and allies said it had no ties to Azov, which made a last stand at the Mariupol Steel Plant before hundreds of its fighters were captured or killed.
The footage itself is a visceral testament to their efforts to rescue the injured on both sides.
A clip recorded on March 10 shows two Russian soldiers being roughly pulled out of an ambulance by a Ukrainian soldier. is in a wheelchair. The other is on his knees, hands tied behind his back, with a clear leg injury. Their eyes are covered with winter hats, and they wear white armlets.
A Ukrainian soldier curses one of them. “Calm down, calm down,” Tayra tells him.
A woman asked him, “Are you going to treat the Russians?”
“They won’t be kind to us,” she replies. “But I could not do otherwise. They are prisoners of war.”
Taira was a member of the Ukraine Invictus Games for Military Veterans, where she was set to compete in archery and swimming. Invictus said she was a military medic from 2018 to 2020, but has since been laid off.
He received the body camera in 2021 for a Netflix documentary series on inspirational figures produced by Britain’s Prince Harry, who founded Invictus Games. But when the Russian army invaded, it used it to shoot scenes of wounded civilians and soldiers.