Moscow's military forces have captured the Ukrainian medic who recorded and smuggled out video footage of Russia's invasion of her country that was stored on a data card that she hid inside a tampon.
The medical professional was identified to be Yuliia Paievska who is known in Ukraine as Taira, which is a moniker from the nickname she chose in the video game World of Warcraft. She used her body camera and recorded 256 gigabytes that showed her team's frantic efforts over two weeks to bring people back from the brink of death.
Ukrainian Medic's Video Footage
Paievska was able to smuggle the data and give it to the Associated Press team, which are the last international journalists on the ground in Ukraine's Mariupol. Later on, Russian forces captured Taira and her driver on Mar. 16, which is one of the many forced disappearances in areas of Ukraine that are now under Moscow's control.
Russia has portrayed the Ukrainian medic as working for the nationalist Azov Battalion, which is in line with Moscow's narrative that its invasion was to "denazify" the European nation. However, there was no such evidence of the claim, and friends and colleagues of Paievska said she had no links to Azov, as per the Associated Press.
The military hospital where Taira led evacuations of the wounded is not affiliated with the battalion, whose members have already spent weeks defending a sprawling steel plant in Mariupol. The footage that the medic recorded is a testament to the fact that she tried to save wounded Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainian civilians.
A clip that was recorded on Mar. 10 showed two Russian troops taken roughly out of an ambulance by a Ukrainian soldier. One of the personnel was in a wheelchair and the other was on his knees with his hands bound behind his back and can be seen with a leg injury.
According to Business Insider, Russian broadcasters aired video footage of Taira and accused her of trying to flee the city in a disguise. In one recording that Paievska took, a team of medics is seen trying to save a young boy's life. Unfortunately, the child did not survive, causing the Ukrainian medic to turn away, placing a bloodied hand on a wall.
Captured by Russian Military Forces
Paievska's helmet footage also picked up sounds of her sobbing as medical devices continued to beep in the background. Another video showed Taira removing her bloodied gloves from her hands and later showed her hustling down a hallway behind first responders as they pushed a stretcher.
The following footage showed the Ukrainian medic tending to the wounded and bloodied face of a man, opening his eyelid with extreme caution as he took extremely deep breaths. Other recordings from Taira's helmet camera showed a soldier on a stretcher before the video cut to a shot of a soldier's bloodied face getting bandaged by medics.
The 53-year-old Ukrainian medic is now a prisoner of Russian military forces, similar to hundreds of local officials, journalists, and other prominent Ukrainians. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has recorded a total of 204 cases of enforced disappearances. They said that some of the victims may have been tortured and that five were later found dead, CBS News reported.
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