RT published a short interview with Marianna Vyshemirskaya (Podgurskaya), a woman in labor from a bombed-out Mariupol maternity hospital, whose photograph appeared in the press around the world in March.
After the capture of Mariupol by Russian troops, Vyshemirskaya and her child were taken to Donetsk, where she remains to this day. Now she tells RT:
“When I was there on the eve of childbirth, two explosions thundered near the maternity hospital. Immediately after that, we went down to the basement, where we were examined by doctors. Because of the fragments, I received a cut on my head, but a minor one. After the inspection, they began to take us outside. I was standing next to the maternity hospital when a man, a journalist, approached me. It turned out that he was filming. I asked him not to take pictures of me, but, as it turned out later, he still took a photo.
Some time later – the day after the birth – he, along with a colleague, found me in the hospital and said that my photos had already been published and now I must definitely comment on what happened. In a video interview, they asked me a specific question at the time: was there an air raid on the maternity hospital? I clearly answered: “No, it wasn’t.” For publication, they cut my interview and cut out the answer about the airstrike. And in general, they took from the interview only those moments that, apparently, were approved by their censorship.
It is not known who or what makes Marianna Vyshemirskaya deny the fact of an airstrike on the Mariupol maternity hospital. But the Associated Press journalists, who witnessed the raid themselves, published more than just an interview with her in March. On March 9, right on the day of the bombing, a one-and-a-half-minute video appeared on the AP YouTube channel, showing damage to the maternity hospital building and undoubted evidence of an airstrike – a crater as deep as a two-story house.
As AP reported back in April, immediately after Vyshemirskaya's first statement denying the airstrike, the agency has at its disposal eyewitness accounts who heard the sounds of the airstrike.
According to the Ukrainian publication Obozrevatel, after the capture of Mariupol, when Vyshemirskaya ended up on the territory of the so-called DPR, her relatives sought her return to the territory controlled by Ukraine, but to no avail. Volunteers who tried to organize the return of Marianne call her a hostage.
The airstrike killed 5 people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child.