A woman on the verge of childbirth with her leg open by shrapnel. A shock wave that broke the glass and ceramic lining of a room with medical waste. A nurse who suffered a concussion.
This is what Ukrainian doctors remember from the Russian air raid that destroyed the Mariupol maternity hospital where they once worked. And these memories are now the only ones they have from a day they would like to forget: Russian soldiers cleared the data from their phones when they escaped from Mariupol.
“With just one blow, there was nothing, there was no children’s clinic, it was just destroyed,” said Dr. Lyudmila Mikhailenko, the current director of Hospital No. 3 in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The large courtyard of the hospital complex was – and remains – “a continuous shell crater”.
Three doctors and a nurse spoke to the Associated Press to give new details of the March 9 airstrike that cut off communications, and to address the new Russian misinformation. They have left the city separately in private cars, as have thousands from Mariupol in recent weeks, and are now scattered in other cities around Ukraine and Poland.
Their testimony, along with the AP report, AP footage from the scene and interviews with ammunition experts who analyzed the size of the shell crater, are in stark contrast to Russian claims that there was no airstrike. Russian officials have repeatedly tried to sow suspicion of atrocities in Mariupol, the devastated city in eastern Ukraine that is a key Russian military target. In particular, Russia has made great efforts to falsely accuse the city of death and destruction in the Ukrainian bombing.
Two of the three doctors, as well as most who passed through Russian checkpoints at the exit from Mariupol, said that their mobile phones were searched and the videos and photos of the city were deleted. People with suspicious images or without documents were separated, but it is not clear what happened to them in the end.
“I had lists on my phone, I had photos, I had everything, but we were strongly told to delete it all,” said Mykhailenko, who spoke for two hours with almost no interruption with a fierce determination to describe the attack itself. . close escape. “The trash can was deleted. We had video from the dashcam camera of everything that was happening in the city, but they made us delete it as well.”
Most recently, a Russian government-linked Twitter account shared an interview last week with Mariana Vishegirskaya, one of the women in the maternity ward. Vishegirskaya, wearing polka dot pajamas and looking dizzy, came out of the hospital air raid almost unscathed.
In the latest interview, the new mother said the hospital was not hit by an air raid last month. He described the blasts as a pair of shells falling close to him, saying he had not heard any aircraft. He left it unclear who could be responsible.
He said the other survivors from the basement agreed when discussing it in the following moments.
“They did not hear it either. They said it was a shell fired from somewhere else. That is, it did not come from the sky,” he said in an interview.
Vishegirskaya is now in Russian-controlled territory, but it is unclear where or under what circumstances the interview was conducted.
However, a group of Associated Press reporters working on the ground near Mariupol recorded the sound of the plane after the two explosions. One of the blasts blew up a two-story crater deep in the courtyard – according to an air raid with a 500-pound bomb and much more powerful than cross-country artillery fire, according to two ammunition experts consulted by the Associated Press.
Joseph Bermudez, an image analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the size of the hole and the visible effects of the impact on surrounding buildings left no doubt that it was an air raid.
The attack on the Mariupol hospital was one of at least 37 Russian strikes on medical facilities across Ukraine recorded by the Associated Press. During the war, every hospital in the city was hit at least once by shells or airstrikes – the first was just four days after the fighting began. Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boichenko said on Wednesday that 50 people had been burned to death by Russian raids on the city’s hospitals.
Prior to the attack, it was a relatively quiet day at the Mariupol hospital.
Dr. Yana Frantsusova was sorting medical waste in a room in another building in the hospital complex when the tiles and glass around her broke. It was about 2:45 p.m. She started running, but the shock wave closed the door in her face.
“I ran out with difficulty and all of us, all the people from my ward, all the nurses, the doctors who were there, they were all already on the floor,” he said. “Then there was another explosion.”
Franceschova had already survived an air raid on a house near her, and she felt the same way – an intense shock wave followed by a complete disaster. She and her team of doctors got up from the floor to pick up the injured and those who could walk.
Of the pregnant women who are at the greatest risk, “one was already giving birth, the moment they brought it to us,” he said. Another had an open wound in her thigh. The third was in a shell position, with broken shrapnel on both legs.
AP reporters filmed two large clouds of smoke in the distance in the direction of the air raid. It then took about 25 minutes to reach the point.
Until then, chaos prevailed. The nurses quickly climbed the stairs to take down anyone who could not walk. Children and dads stumbled out the doors in a revealing scene with blackened trees, a smoldering crater large enough to swallow a truck.
Vishegirskaya was already out, hugging a blanket over her shoulders. When an AP reporter asked her on camera how she was, she replied “Fine” and then went to try to get her belongings from the hospital. In an interview with Russian media, she falsely told AP reporters that she did not want to be filmed.
Sergei Chernobrivets, a nurse who was at the scene that day, described the injuries to several women. He said he was unable to determine the source of the blasts, but confirmed extensive damage to the hospital complex.
Dr Yulia Kucheruk, one of the obstetricians, said one nurse had a concussion and another was in shock. It made no sense to stay behind to try to recover usable medical supplies, he added, because “they all had rubbish in the chaos.” Kucheruk spoke only briefly about a day that remains painful to visit again.
Several women were taken to another hospital, including Vishegirskaya and a woman with a pelvic fracture who died with her unborn child the same day. Vishegirskaya gave birth to a girl the next day.
Until then, the Russian disinformation campaign was in full swing. The country’s embassy in the United Kingdom shared photos of Vishegirskaya’s AP and another woman injured on a stretcher, placing the word “FAKE” above the pictures and claiming that Vishegirskaya had posed in both with “realistic make-up”. The misinformation was repeated by Russian ambassadors to other parts of the world.
Russia has blamed Ukrainian bombings for attacks on hospitals, including a maternity hospital in Mariupol, although its history of violence that day has changed over time.
Distorting the truth about war crimes is a deliberate Russian tactic, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a speech Monday night, just three days after Vishegirskaya’s interview was published in the Russian media.
“They have already launched a fake campaign to hide their guilt for the mass murder of civilians in Mariupol,” he said.
The hospital was hit again on March 17 and four or five of the patients on the corridors were killed, Mykhailenko said. Without bringing the bodies, they were buried in the hospital.
Days later, in despair and with a leg condition that made it increasingly difficult for her to run from the bombing, she and her family picked up what was left and stacked it in the car.
At the first checkpoint, her phone was wiped. In the second, their belongings were searched and their knife was confiscated. They chose their way through a minefield where a car had been blown up the day before. More than two weeks later, they arrived safely in Poland.
On March 24, Kucheruk also drove out and headed for western Ukraine. She went through 20 Russian checkpoints, including one where her cell phone was searched and its contents deleted.
Now most of the doctors in Mariupol have fled and the city is left without even a fully functioning hospital. They have lost the lives and careers they had built, and can only hope that one day they will return to their ruined city.
“Your whole life turned into a pile of rubble in an instant, everything you loved, everything you tried to do, everything you tried to achieve,” Mykhailenko said. “Everything was canceled simply because a guy dropped this bomb after another bastard gave that order.”
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Susie Blann and Vasilisa Stepanenko in Lviv, Ukraine contributed.
