Paramedics kidnapped on their way to help victims of Mariupol theatre bombing

RUSSIA kidnapped paramedics rushing to save survivors of the Mariupol theatre bombing, the teenage daughter of the missing volunteer has revealed.

Julia Paevska was snatched by Russian troops as she travelled to the scene of the bombing, where some 1,300 women and children were sheltering in the besieged city.

Anna-sophia Puzanova said on March 16 that her mother had stopped to treat a wounded civilian trying to escape the bombing when she was captured. The 19-year-old said: “She was captured with her driver Serhiy, also a volunteer, driving an ambulance in a humanitarian corridor.”

Apart from appearances in Kremlin propaganda videos, Ms Puzanova has not seen or heard from her mother since her kidnap. They last spoke days before the kidnapping, when Ms Paevska told her daughter about her work rescuing civilians trying to escape bombardment by Russian forces.

Ms Puzanova said: “I know the Russian occupiers will torture them... Russian propaganda talks about her as a really dangerous woman, a killer, really violent, but that’s not true.”

Ms Puzanova thinks her mother is one of thousands taken to concentration camps in pro-russian breakaway regions of Ukraine.

Ms Paevska, nicknamed Tayra, is among the prisoners of war the Ukrainian government is willing to swap for captured Russians, but Moscow has refused requests for her exchange.

As the founder of Tayra’s Angels, the volunteer ambulance corps, she is seen as a prize scalp for the Kremlin.