Ukrainian medic Yulia Paievska, known as Taira, was arrested by the Russian military in Mariupol on March 16. He said he was a victim of “extreme” abuse for three months.
“For five days I had nothing to eat and practically nothing to drink,” Julia told CNN on June 17, three weeks after her liberation by Moscow forces and troops from proRussian separatist areas. The Ukrainian medic said the attacks “didn’t stop for a minute in all three months”.
Ukrainian paramedic Taira is welcomed to Ukraine. Captured in Mariupol on March 16, released on June 17
Yulia Paievska is an Aikido trainer and designer by training. With the war in Russia in 2014, she founded the paramedic team “Angels of Taira”, which rescued >500 🇺🇦soldiers by 2019 pic.twitter.com/Txod3H43aJ
— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) June 18, 2022
She was jailed at a detention center in the breakaway Donetsk Republic, now under Russian control, where she reveals she was constantly told by guards that she was a “fascist” and that she was being forced to consume pieces of propaganda, it was reported about Russian victories in the Ukraine war. “It would be better to be dead than to wait and see what might happen next,” Yulia confessed.
The former prisoner compared her experiences to the “gulags”, the Sovietera labor camps that reached a new level of brutality under the leadership of Joseph Stalin and were reserved for prisoners of war, homosexuals, dissidents and political opponents.
Without giving her captors a recorded confession of her alleged ties to neoNazi groups, Yulia was placed in “solitary confinement,” “a dungeon with no mattress, just a metal bed,” she said in an interview with US television.
The Ukrainian took part in the 2014 demonstrations in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Square against thenproRussian President Yanukovych. He then went to the front lines to fight against Russianbacked separatists in the Donbass region, eventually officially enlisting in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Yulia said that she lost 10 kilograms in weight during her detention and that she now suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder and does not plan to return to the front lines as she cannot fight.
She stressed that one of the great engines of the Russian war machine is the propaganda spread by the Kremlin, which she believes is being run by an “absolutely brutal regime that wants to rule the world”.