Russian forces have freed a celebrated Ukrainian medic who used a body camera to record her team’s efforts to save the injured in the besieged city of Mariupol.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky announced Yuliia Paievska, known as Taira, was “already home” after being freed on Friday, three months after she was taken captive on the streets of the city.
The day before she was captured, she gave the footage to Associated Press journalists, who were the last remaining international reporters in the embattled city, and one of them fled with it embedded in a tampon.
Taira and a colleague were taken prisoner by Russia on March 16, the same day an airstrike hit a theatre in the city, killing around 600 people.
“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, said.
“We managed to liberate ‘Taira’, Ukrainian paramedic Yuliia Paievska, from captivity. I am grateful to everyone who worked for this result,” Mr Zelensky said in his nightly video address.
“Taira is already home. We will keep working to liberate everyone.”
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08:26 AM
MoD: Russia likely to advance deeper into Donetsk region
It is likely that Russian forces have renewed their efforts to advance south of Ukraine’s eastern city of Izium in the past 48 hours, the Ministry of Defence has said.
In their daily intelligence update, posted on Twitter, the MoD said Russia’s goal is to advance deeper into the Donetsk region and envelope Severodonetsk, which has seen intense fighting in recent weeks, from the north.
