The pregnant woman and her baby died after Russia bombed the maternity hospital where she was due to give birth, The Associated Press has learned. Images of a woman being taken to an ambulance on a stretcher have gone around the world, embodying the horror of the attack.
Video and photos from last Wednesday’s Mariupol hospital bombing show a woman stroking her bloodied lower abdomen as rescuers hurried her through the rubble.
The woman was taken to another hospital closer to the front line, where doctors tried to save her life. According to the doctors, realizing that she was losing a child, she screamed at them: “Kill me now.”
Surgeon Timur Marin said he found a crushed pelvis and severed hip in the woman. According to Marin, doctors gave birth to a child by caesarean section, but he showed no signs of life. Then they focused on the mother.
“More than 30 minutes of resuscitation of the mother yielded no results,” Marin said. “Both are dead.”
In the chaos following the attack, the medics did not have time to find out the name of the woman, as her husband and father came to collect her body. At least someone came for her, they said, so that she would not end up in one of the mass graves dug for many Mariupol residents.
Russian officials accused of war crimes said the maternity hospital had been taken over by Ukrainian extremists for use as a base, and that no patients or medical personnel were left inside. Russia’s permanent representative to the UN and the Russian embassy in London called the pictures “fake news”.
Associated Press journalists tracked down the victims on Friday and Saturday at the hospital where they were taken, on the outskirts of Mariupol.
In the besieged city, which has been without food, water, electricity and heat for more than a week, electricity from emergency generators is reserved for operating rooms.
As the survivors described their ordeal, explosions outside shook the walls. Shelling and gunfire in the area are sporadic but ongoing.
Blogger Mariana Vishegirskaya gave birth to a girl the day after the explosion. She hugged the newborn Veronica, talking about the explosion. After photographs and video showed her descending the debris-strewn stairs clutching a blanket, Russian officials said she was involved in a staged attack.
“It happened on March 9 in hospital No. 3 in Mariupol. We were lying in the wards when glass, frames, windows and walls shattered, ”said Vyshegirskaya, still in the same polka-dot pajamas in which she fled. “We don’t know how it happened. We were in our wards, and some managed to hide behind, some didn’t.”
Her trial was one of many in Mariupol, which has become a symbol of resistance to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The failure to subdue Mariupol prompted Russian troops to expand their offensive elsewhere.