Medic’s bodycam shows horrors
In a makeshift operating theatre in Mariupol, a celebrated Ukrainian medic pleads with a bloodied, critically wounded boy to “stay with me, little one”.
He had arrived with his wounded sister from a shootout at a checkpoint in the town besieged by Russian forces and in which their parents both died. Using a body camera given to her by Prince Harry, Yuliia Paievska, known in Ukraine as Tayra — a moniker from the nickname she chose in the World of Warcraft video game — films the tragic moment she closes his eyes with her fingers.
Turning away from his lifeless body, the medic breaks down in tears. “I hate [this],” she sobs, closing her eyes.
Such terrible scenes would never have reached the wider world had Tayra, 53, not managed to smuggle hundreds of hours of footage out of Mariupol on a data card no bigger than a thumbnail, which she stuffed into a tampon. It contains 256 gigabytes of her team’s frantic efforts over two weeks to bring people back from the brink of death — Ukrainians but also Russian soldiers.
Even before the film, Tayra was a household name in Ukraine as a star athlete and the person who trained the country’s volunteer medic force.
Her incredible spirit of resistance shines through as she embraces doctors and cracks jokes to cheer up despondent ambulance drivers and patients alike. At one point, the married mother of a teenage daughter chides an injured Ukrainian soldier who wants her to ring his mum, telling him to ring her himself but “don’t make her nervous”.
Tayra miraculously managed to hand the harrowing clips to an Associated Press team, the last international journalists in the city of Mariupol, as they left in a humanitarian convoy.