Medic’s bodycam shows horrors of Mariupol
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.
As always, she wears a stuffed animal attached to her vest to hand to any children she might treat.
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.
To salvage the extraordinary video testimony, the team had to pass through 15 Russian checkpoints before reaching Ukrainian-controlled territory.
The next day, on March 16, Tayra disappeared with her driver Serhiy. On that same day, a Russian airstrike shattered the Mariupol theatre and killed close to 600 people.
She is now a prisoner, one of hundreds of prominent Ukrainians who have been kidnapped or captured, including local officials, journalists, activists and human rights defenders.
Before the war, Tayra was a member of the Ukraine Invictus Games for military veterans, where she was set to compete in archery and swimming.
She had received the body camera in 2021 to film for a Netflix documentary series on inspirational figures being produced by Prince Harry, who founded the Invictus Games. Telegraph Group Ltd