Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori Hinant, Associated Press, published on Thursday, May 19, 2022, 7:41 AM EDT
KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) – A famous Ukrainian medic recorded his time in Mariupol on a data map no larger than a miniature transported around the world with a tampon. Now it is in Russian hands, at a time when Mariupol itself is on the verge of collapse.
Yulia Paevska is known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname from the nickname she chose in the video game World of Warcraft. Using a body camera, she recorded 256 gigabytes of her team’s frantic efforts in two weeks to bring people back to the brink of death. She handed over painful videos to the Associated Press team, the latest international journalists in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, when they left in a rare humanitarian convoy.
Russian troops captured Tyra and her driver the next day, March 16, one of many violent disappearances in parts of Ukraine now held by Russia. Russia portrayed Tyra as working for the Azov Nationalist Battalion, according to Moscow’s account of trying to “disinfect” Ukraine. But the AP found no such evidence, and friends and colleagues said she had no ties to Azov.
The military hospital where she is in charge of evacuating the wounded is not affiliated with the battalion, whose members spent weeks defending a sprawling steel plant in Mariupol. Footage recorded by Tyra shows that she tried to save wounded Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainian civilians.
A video recorded on March 10 shows two Russian soldiers roughly taken 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 leg injury. Their eyes are covered with winter hats and they wear white ribbons.
A Ukrainian soldier curses one of them. “Calm down, calm down,” Tyra tells him.
A woman asks her, “Will you treat the Russians?”
“They won’t be so kind to us,” she replies. “But I could not do otherwise. They are prisoners of war. “
Taira is now a prisoner of the Russians, one of hundreds of prominent Ukrainians who have been abducted or captured, including local officials, journalists, activists and human rights defenders.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has registered 204 cases of enforced disappearances. It says some victims may have been tortured and five later found dead. The Ukrainian ombudsman’s office said it had received reports of thousands missing by the end of April, 528 of whom may have been captured.
The Russians are also targeting medics and hospitals, although the Geneva Conventions separate both military and civilian medics for protection “under all circumstances.” The World Health Organization has confirmed more than 100 attacks on health care since the start of the war, and the number is likely to increase.
Most recently, Russian soldiers withdrew a woman from a convoy in Mariupol on May 8, accused her of being a military medic and forced her to choose between letting her 4-year-old daughter accompany her to an unknown fate or continue to Ukraine-controlled territory. The mother and child eventually separated and the little girl managed to reach the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhye, UN officials said.
“It’s not about saving one woman,” said Alexandra Chudna, who volunteered as a medic in Taira in 2014. “Taira will represent those medics and women who went to the front.”
Tyra’s situation is taking on new significance as the last defenders in Mariupol are evacuated to Russian territory, in what Russia calls a mass capitulation and Ukraine calls a mission accomplished. Russia says more than 1,700 Ukrainian fighters have surrendered in Mariupol this week, drawing new attention to the treatment of prisoners. Ukraine expressed hope that the fighters could be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war, but a Russian official said without evidence that they should not be exchanged, but face trial.
The Ukrainian government has said it tried to add Tyra’s name to the prisoner exchange weeks ago. However, Russia denies detaining her, despite appearing on television in Ukraine’s separatist Donetsk region and Russia’s NTV network, handcuffed and bruised. The Ukrainian government declined to talk about the issue in question.
Tyra, 53, is known in Ukraine as a star athlete and the man who trained volunteer medical forces in the country. What appears in her video and in the descriptions of her friends is a large, boisterous person with a telegenic presence, a person who enjoys swimming with dolphins.
The video is an intimate recording from February 6 to March 10 of a city under siege, which has now become a global symbol of the Russian invasion and Ukrainian resistance. In it, Taira is a whirlwind of energy and grief, recording the death of a child and the treatment of wounded soldiers on both sides.
On February 24, the first day of the war, Taira described efforts to bandage an open wound on the head of a Ukrainian soldier.
Two days later, she ordered colleagues to wrap a wounded Russian soldier in a blanket. “Cover him because he’s shaking,” she said in the video. She calls the young man “Sunshine” – a favorite nickname of many soldiers who passed through her arms – and asks why he came to Ukraine.
“You take care of me,” he tells her, almost surprised. Her response: “We treat everyone equally.”
Later that night, two children – a brother and a sister – arrived seriously injured in a shootout at a checkpoint. Their parents are dead. By the end of the night, despite Tyra’s pleas to “stay with me, little one,” it’s the same with the little boy.
Tyra pulls away from her lifeless body and cries. “I hate (that),” she says. She closes his eyes.
Talking to someone in the dark outside while smoking, she says, “The boy is gone. The boy died. They are still resuscitating the girl. Maybe she will survive. “
At one point, she stares in the bathroom mirror, a short blond hair falling on her forehead in stark contrast to the shaved sides of her head. She cuts off the camera.
During the video, she complains of chronic pain from back and thigh injuries that left her partially disabled. She hugs doctors. She jokes to cheer up discouraged ambulance drivers and patients. And she always carries a stuffed animal attached to her vest to pass on to all the children she can treat.
With her husband and teenage daughter, she knew what family war could do. At one point, a wounded Ukrainian soldier asked her to call his mother. She tells him that he will be able to call her himself, “so don’t make her nervous.”
On March 15, a police officer handed over the small data card to a team of journalists from the Associated Press who documented atrocities in Mariupol, including a Russian air strike against a maternity hospital. The office contacted Tyra on a walkie-talkie and she asked reporters to take the card safely out of town. The map was hidden in a pad and the team went through 15 Russian checkpoints before reaching Ukrainian-controlled territory.
The next day, Tyra disappeared with her driver, Sergei. On the same day, a Russian air strike destroyed a theater in Mariupol, killing nearly 600 people.
A video aired on a March 21 Russian news program reported her capture, accusing her of trying to escape the city in disguise. Tyra looks tired and exhausted as she reads a statement posted on camera calling for an end to the battle. As she speaks, a behind-the-scenes voice ridicules her colleagues as Nazis, using language echoed this week in Russia as she describes the Mariupol fighters.
The broadcast was the last time she was seen.
Both the Russian and Ukrainian governments have published interviews with prisoners of war, despite international humanitarian law, which describes the practice as inhuman and degrading treatment.
Tyra’s husband, Vadim Puzanov, said he had received little news about his wife after her disappearance. Carefully choosing his words, he described constant anxiety as well as outrage at how she was portrayed by Russia.
“Accusing a volunteer doctor of all mortal sins, including organ trafficking, is already scandalous propaganda – I don’t even know who it is,” he said.
Raed Saleh, head of the Syrian White Helmets, compared the situation in Taira to what volunteers from his group are facing and continue to face in Syria. He said his group was also accused of organ trafficking and working with terrorist groups.
“Tomorrow they may ask her to make statements and press her to say things,” Saleh said.
Tyra is of great importance in Ukraine because of her reputation. She teaches aikido martial arts and works as a medic as a sideline.
She adopted her name in 2013 when she joined first aid volunteers at the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, which ousted a Russian-backed government. In 2014, Russia reconquered the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.
Tyra went to the eastern region of Donbass, where Moscow-backed separatists fought Ukrainian forces. There she taught tactical medicine and created a group of medics called the Angels of Tyra. She has also worked as a liaison between the military and civilians in frontline cities, where few doctors and hospitals dare to work. In 2019 she left for the Mariupol region, where her medical unit is based.
Tyra was a member of the Ukrainian Invictus Games for military veterans, where she had to compete in archery and swimming. Invictus said she has been a military medic since 2018.
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