KYIV, Ukraine – During the siege of Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, the Russians shelled the city and blocked the exits of civilians, creating one of the worst humanitarian crisis in war. When Ukrainian soldiers took refuge in the Azovstal steel plant, medic Yulia Paievska did the dangerous job of evacuating families from a city under constant attack.
Paievska, 53, is already well known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she first used in the video game World of Warcraft. Her all-female volunteer medical group, known as Taira’s Angels, rose to prominence in Ukraine during the previous war in the eastern Donbas region.
So when Russian soldiers arrested her on March 16 while 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 courage and self-sacrifice for Ukrainians.
In an interview with The New York Times, conducted by video from Kyiv’s hospital room, where she has been recovering since her release about three weeks ago in a prisoner exchange, She accused her captors of torture, including relentless beatings.
“All three months I was in my cell, in the basement – just looking at a little piece of sky and thistle in the window,” she said.
She quickly learned that Russia’s treatment would be harsh. After being arrested with her driver, she was taken to a prison in Russian-occupied Donetsk, where she demanded a phone call. “You’ve seen too many American movies,” she said. “There won’t be any calls.”
She was put in a frozen cell and interrogated for several hours. For the first five days, she said, she was given no food and drank about half a glass of water a day.
“They were trying to get evidence on 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 did some bad things, killed someone. I don’t blame myself. I paid a heavy price.”
The Russians dragged her in front of the camera 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 took a video of herself before she took it, with a head-mounted camera. The day before her detention, she gave one of her memory cards to an Associated Press journalist, who hid it in a tampon and then left Mariupol. A month after the release of the Russian-language video, The AP published her footage.
It shows what she sees as she treats children and soldiers. In one clip, filmed two days after the Russian invasion in late February, she orders colleagues to wrap blankets around a freezing Russian soldier.
“We treat everyone equally,” she told the soldier, who expressed surprise.
Kindness was not reciprocated.
Better understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Ms. Paievska was held in solitary confinement and deprived of her thyroid medication and asthma inhaler for a month. She was eventually put in a 10 by 20 foot cell along with 21 other women. Two or three people share each bed, making sleep difficult.
Ms. Paievska is an aikido instructor and designed books and ceramics before Ukraine The Maidan Revolution, the protests led to the 2014 ouster of a pro-Russian president. As thousands camped in Kyiv’s central square for months, she trained again as a doctor to care for injured protesters.
When the Russian-backed separatists began fighting that year in the Donbas, she volunteered to the front. She joined the army in 2018, was in charge of the evacuation department in a mobile hospital in Mariupol, but left the military service in 2020 and continued her volunteer work. She estimates she has trained more than 8,000 people in tactical medicine.
During her detention, Ms. Paievska said, little was provided by offering. She has a pair of panties and a pair of sturdy Levi’s pants. She was saved from the freezing cold of her cell because she was wearing a fur coat when she was arrested.
“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 allowed to leave the building to take a walk in the yard.
Many women incarcerated, she said, have psychological problems.
In the prison offices, officials hang portraits of Stalin and his two police chiefs, Genrikh Yionary and Lavrenti P. Beria. In Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, the reputation of the men, who played a key role in purging Stalin’s opponents, is being restored.
Detainees were asked to sing and chant pro-Russian songs and slogans.
“Of course, they forced us to sing the Russian national anthem,” she said, adding, “I learned that. ‘Glory to Putin! Glory to Russia! ‘ All these stupid exhortations”.
Ms. Paievska’s treatment traces the torture and poor care that the United Nations has documented in prisons in the Donetsk region since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists took control there. .
In a report released last summerThe United Nations says 4,300 to 4,700 detainees have been tortured and mistreated “systematically”.
Matilda Bogner, head of the United Nations Human Rights Watch Mission in Ukraine, said that since February 24, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country, “it is quite safe to assume that it is safe to assume conditions continue to deteriorate”.
Ms. Paievska said she relies on her martial arts training and background in psychology to cope.
“I understand what techniques they applied to me,” she said, “and what I needed to do to not break, not bend.”
After three months in detention, she said, one day a guard opened the cell door. He told her to turn her back.
“They put a bag over my head,” she said, carefully leading her to a car, then “taken the bag off my head and took me out of Donetsk without saying anything. “
She didn’t know if she would be swapped or shot. A woman who was released later told her that the detainees had been informed that she had been killed.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announced her release on June 17 in his nightly address. “We will continue to work to free people,” Zelensky promised.
It is not clear how many Ukrainians are still detained by Russia. Late last month – a day after the transfer of 144 Ukrainian soldiers, the largest prisoner swap since February – a Russian Defense Ministry press official said it had detained 6,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war, a number that cannot be independently verified.
In captivity, Ms. Paievska said, she only heard propaganda about the situation in Ukraine.
“I’m soaking everything like a sponge now,” she said, despite the painful news — too many friends lost, too many injured.
And she is facing the damage of the siege of Mariupol and her captivity.
“When I was released, I was physically exhausted to the extreme,” she said. “I suffer the consequences of this, and I will probably suffer the consequences for the rest of my life.”
She lost more than 20 pounds and had trouble sleeping. She said her detention also left her with psychiatric symptoms.
“I had a shell shock at Mariupol, and then I suffered a lot so my memory is not very good,” she said. “But I remember what I had to do.”
Memories of the horrors witnessed can be hard to shake.
Footage Ms. Paievska stealthily leaving Mariupol shows her caring for two children whose parents were killed in battle at a checkpoint. The boy was also injured, and in the video, she begs him, “Stay with me, baby.” Moments later, he died. Her camera captures her turning away and crying.
“I hate this,” she said as she closed her eyes.
Oleksandr Chubko contribution report.
