A woman suffered from the Russian shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol appeared in a video

The Mariupol resident Marianna Vyshemyrska that suffered from the Russian bombardment of Mariupol maternity home on March 9, was interviewed by Russian propagandists. On Instagram, she also posted a video on which she repeated the same thing.

On March 9, correspondents of the Associated Press Yevgen Malolietka and Mstyslav Chernov took photos of the ruined maternity building in Mariupol and injured patients – these photos circled over the whole world. In the pictures was also Marianna.

From the interview there is no possibility to understand where Vyshemyrska is at the moment, who speaks with her and under what circumstances. In the frame she sits against the background of a coach and the wall, leaning against the pillow. This video and the fragments from it are shared in Russian Telegram channels which excuse the war in Ukraine.

In the video she tells that before the war she lived in occupied Makiivka, then got acquainted with her future husband and moved to Mariupol in 2020. There she got pregnant.

The girl mentioned that from the beginning of March there was no electricity, water and gas, and it was impossible to leave the city. On March 6, she and her husband went to the maternity home #3, where she remained up to March 9 when the bombardment happened. Vyshemyrska states that another maternity home on the outskirts of Mariupol was taken by soldiers because there were working solar panels. Women that were transferred from there allegedly told about it.

In the afternoon on March 9, Vyshemyrska says there have been two explosions, in the result of which she’s got minor face injuries. After that, women were evacuated from rooms to the cellar. Then the girl says that people who were outside at the moment of the explosions told them that it wasn’t the airstrike. Vyshemyrska says, “Our thought that we didn’t hear the explosion proved, they also didn’t hear and said that the shell rushed in.”

Afterwards, people started evacuating women from the cellar. Vyshemyrska said that she went outside one of the last people, letting go the injured women. There she asked the police to go to the room with her to grab her stuff and documents. “About 30 minutes I spent near the maternity home, where my pictures were taken,” Marianna says, adding that she requested not to shoot her. She also didn’t consent to publish the photos. After two days, when Vyshemyrska had already given birth to a child and was in the hospital, the same reporters visited her for a conversation.

On March 9, the Ukrainian government declared that Russian aviation bombed the maternity home in Mariupol. The Russian authorities and state media repeatedly called the bombardment of the maternity home fake. Among the versions there were theories that Marianna Vyshemyrska is a made up actress or the building was allegedly the base of Ukrainian soldiers.