Joy as Ukrainian who recorded horrors is freed
Ukrainians are celebrating the release from Russian captivity of a paramedic whose head camera videoed the horrors of the siege of Mariupol.
A photograph on Twitter apparently shows Yulia Payevska, better known as Taira, looking thin after three months as a prisoner but smiling after being freed.
“We managed to liberate Taira, Ukrainian paramedic Yulia Payevska, from captivity,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said. “We will keep working to liberate everyone.”
Vadim Puzanov, her husband, said: “It was such a sense of relief. Those sound like such ordinary words, and I don’t even know what to say.” He added that he spoke by phone with his wife, who was en route to a Kyiv hospital, and feared for her health.
Payevska, 53, filmed her work in
Mariupol during the first three weeks of the invasion. Her footage showed helicopter pilots evacuating civilians and soldiers injured by shelling. In one scene, her camera captures the moment a boy dies of his wounds. She closes his eyelids. Payevska managed to smuggle a data card hidden in a tampon with hundreds of hours of footage out of the city with a pair of fleeing photojournalists before she was captured in mid-march.
Russian artillery pounded Mariupol into rubble, destroying the city where 400,000 people had once lived. Its capture in May was celebrated by the Kremlin as one of its first war victories.
Even before the remarkable footage appeared, Payevska was a household name in Ukraine.
She had been a paramedic through the Euromaidan revolution of 2014, which forced the pro-kremlin president to flee, before shifting to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine where she set up units of paramedics.
These were called “Taira’s Angels” and treated soldiers injured in battles with separatist fighters.
The Ukrainian government has not said how it managed to free Payevska but it is believed her name was put on a prisoner exchange list.
Initially the family had kept quiet, hoping negotiations would take their course. But The Associated Press spoke with Puzanov before releasing the smuggled videos, which had millions of viewers around the world. The coverage showed Payevska was trying to save Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainian civilians.
In a video posted yesterday on Telegram, she thanked Zelenskyy for aiding her release.