A celebrated Ukrainian medic whose footage was smuggled out of the besieged city of Mariupol by an Associated Press team was freed by Russian forces, three months after she was taken captive on the streets of the city. 9News
"It was such a great sense of relief. Those sound like such ordinary words, and I don't even know what to say," her husband, Vadim Puzanov, told The Associated Press late Friday, breathing deeply to contain his emotion. Puzanov said he spoke by phone with Taira, who was en route to a Kyiv hospital, and feared for her health.
Puzanov expressed gratitude for the coverage, which showed Taira was trying to save Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainian civilians Hundreds of prominent Ukrainians have been kidnapped or captured, including local officials, journalists, activists and human rights defenders. Russia portrayed Taira as working for the nationalist Azov Battalion, in line with Moscow's narrative that it is attempting to "denazify" Ukraine. But the AP found no such evidence, and friends and colleagues said she had no links to Azov, which made a last stand in a Mariupol steel plant before hundreds of its fighters were captured or killed.A clip recorded on March 10 shows two Russian soldiers taken roughly out of an ambulance by a Ukrainian soldier. One is in a wheelchair.