Nathan News

KYIV, Ukraine – During the siege of Mariupol in southern Ukraine, the Russians pounded the city with artillery and blocked civilian escape routes, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises of the war. . As Ukrainian soldiers dug in at the Azovstal steelworks, medic Yulia Paievska took on the dangerous task of evacuating families from a city under constant attack.

Ms Paievska, 53, was already well known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she first used in the World of Warcraft video game. His group of all-female volunteer doctors, called Taira’s Angels, had become famous in Ukraine during the previous war in the eastern region of Donbass.

So when Russian soldiers captured her on March 16 as she was evacuating a group from Mariupol, they knew exactly who she was. Detained for three months, unable to communicate with her husband and daughter, she became a symbol of Ukrainian bravery and selflessness.

In an interview with The New York Times, conducted via video from the Kyiv hospital room where she has been recovering since being released about three weeks ago in a prisoner exchange, she accused her captors of torture, including incessant beatings.

“The three months that I spent in a cell, in the basement, looking only at a small piece of sky and thistles in the window,” she said.

She soon learned that the Russian treatment would be harsh. After being captured with her driver, she was taken to a Russian-occupied prison in Donetsk, where she asked to make a phone call. “You’ve watched too many American movies,” he was told. “There will be no calls.”

She was thrown into a freezing cell and repeatedly interrogated for hours. For the first five days, she says, she received no food and about half a glass of water a day.

“They tried to extract evidence from me,” she said, convinced she had secret information about an attack on Russia. “They wanted me to admit that I was a Nazi, that I had done bad things, killed someone. I didn’t incriminate myself. It cost me dearly.”

The Russians dragged her in front of the cameras for a propaganda video, released 10 days after her arrest, in which she was compared to Hitler and accused of using children as shields.

But Ms Paievska had shot her own videos before her capture, using a front-facing camera. The day before her arrest, she hid a memory card in a tampon and gave it to two Associated Press reporters leaving Mariupol. A month after the Russian video aired, the AP released its footage.

This shows what she saw while tending to children and soldiers. In one clip, shot two days after the invasion of Russia in late February, she ordered her colleagues to wrap a blanket around a frozen Russian soldier.

“We treat everyone the same,” she told the soldier, who expressed surprise.

The kindness was not returned.

Ms Paievska was thrown into solitary confinement and deprived of her thyroid medication and asthma inhaler for a month. She was eventually placed in a 10-by-20-foot cell with 21 other women. Two or three shared each bunk, which made sleeping difficult.

Ms Paievska was an aikido trainer and designed books and ceramics before Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, the protests that led to the 2014 ousting of a pro-Russian president. As thousands camped out in Kyiv’s central square for months, she retrained as a doctor to treat injured protesters.

When Russian-backed separatists started a war that year in Donbass, she volunteered at the front. She joined the military in 2018, heading the evacuation ward of a mobile hospital in Mariupol, but left military service in 2020 and returned to volunteer work. She estimates that she has trained more than 8,000 people in tactical medicine.

While in detention, Ms. Paievska said, few supplies were offered. She had a pair of underwear on and a sturdy pair of Levi’s. She was saved from the biting cold of the cell because she was wearing a fur coat when she was captured.

“They didn’t give us towels or anything,” she said. “No toothpaste, no toothbrush, nothing.” She said she was only allowed to shower once in three months and was never able to leave the building to walk around the yard.

Many of the women detained with her had psychological issues, she said. The group included both criminals and Ukrainians with military ties.

In the prison, officials hung portraits of Stalin and two chiefs of his secret police, Genrikh Yagoda and Lavrenti P. Beria. In the Russia of Vladimir V. Putin, the reputation of the men who played a major role in the purges of opponents of Stalin are being rehabilitated.

Detainees were forced to sing and chant pro-Russian songs and slogans.

“Of course they forced us to sing the Russian anthem,” she said, adding, “I learned it. ‘Glory to Putin! Glory to Russia! All those stupid chants.

Ms Paievska’s treatment follows the torture and poor care the United Nations has documented in prisons in the Donetsk region since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists took control.

In a report released last summer, the United Nations said 4,300 to 4,700 detainees had been “systematically” tortured and ill-treated.

Since Feb. 24, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country, “it would be pretty safe to assume that conditions have deteriorated further,” said Matilda Bogner, head of the Human Rights Monitoring Mission. UN man in Ukraine.

Ms Paievska said she relied on her practice of martial arts and her training in psychology to cope.

“I understood what techniques they applied to me,” she said, “and what I had to do not to break, not to bend.”

After three months of detention, she said, one day a guard opened the cell door. He told her to turn her back on him.

“They put a bag over my head,” she said, led her carefully to a car, then “took the bag off my head and took me from Donetsk without saying a word “.

She didn’t know if she would be traded or shot. A woman who was later released told her that the inmates were told she had been killed.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced his release on June 17 in his evening speech. “We will continue to work to free everyone,” Mr. Zelensky promised.

The number of Ukrainians still held by the Russians is unclear. Late last month – the day after the transfer of 144 Ukrainian soldiers, the largest prisoner exchange since February – a Russian Defense Ministry press officer said it was holding 6,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war, a number which could not be independently verified.

In captivity, Ms. Paievska said, she only heard propaganda about the situation in Ukraine.

“Now I’m absorbing everything like a sponge,” she said, though much of the news is painful – so many friends lost, so many hurt.

And she faces the toll of the siege of Mariupol and her captivity.

“When I was released I was physically exhausted to the extreme,” she said. “I have consequences from this, and I probably will for the rest of my life.”

She has lost over 20 pounds and has trouble sleeping. Her detention also left her with mental symptoms, she said.

“I had a shell shock before in Mariupol, then I had to endure so much, so my memory is not very good,” she said. “But I remember what I have to do.”

Memories of the horrors one has witnessed can be hard to shake.

Footage Ms Paievska smuggled out of Mariupol shows her caring for two children whose parents were killed in fighting at a checkpoint. The boy was also injured and in the video she begs him: “Stay with me, my little one. Moments later, he dies. Her camera captures her turning away crying.

“I hate it,” she said, closing her eyes.

Oleksandr Chubko contributed report.