“I always thought that would be the case, and everyone on the other side now knows that everything will be fine,” Yulia Payevska said in a video clip on Saturday in which she thanked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for her release. Paievska, 53, is known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she chose from the video game World of Warcraft. Using a body camera, Paievska recorded more than 200 gigabytes of her team’s dramatic efforts over a two-week period to rescue wounded civilians as well as Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. He handed the video on March 15 to an Associated Press team, the last international journalists in Mariupol, one of whom hid it in a tampon. Paievska was captured by Russian soldiers the next day and spent more than three months in captivity. During his national speech on Friday night, Zelensky announced for the first time the release of Pajevska. “I am grateful to all those who worked for this result. Taira is already home. “We will continue to work to free everyone,” he said. Paievska’s release was accepted throughout Ukraine because of her long-standing reputation as a veteran doctor who has trained the country’s volunteer medical force. He founded a group of doctors called Taira’s angels and had served as a point of contact between the army and civilians in front-line cities. The body camera she used to record her time in Mariupol was originally intended for a Netflix documentary produced by Prince Harry for inspirational people. Russia has tried to portray Paievska as a far-right nationalist working for Azov’s constitution, which led the factory’s defense. Some pro-Kremlin media outlets have claimed, without providing any evidence, that Paievska was involved in the killing of civilians in Mariupol. The Azov Regiment was formed in 2014 as a volunteer militia to fight Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine, and many of its original members had far-right extremist views. Since then, the unit has been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard and the constitution now denies being fascist, racist or neo-Nazi. The Azov movement has been used as a key part of the narrative of Russian propaganda to justify the war in Ukraine. The military hospital where Paievska treated the wounded, however, is not affiliated with the Azov Battalion, and plans to testify show that she tried to save wounded Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians. In an excerpt recorded March 10 and quoted by the AP, Paievska is asked by another woman if she is going to treat two seriously injured Russian soldiers. “They will not be so kind to us,” he replies. “But I could not do otherwise. “They are prisoners of war.” It was not immediately clear whether Paievska’s release was part of a prisoner exchange with Russia. In a rare public criticism by a Russian state-run media reporter, Channel One war correspondent Irina Kuksenkova said it was a “dark plan” for the son of a Chechen official who had been abducted earlier in Ukraine. “There was no trade. “There was a vague plan by which Taira ended up in Ukraine,” Kuksenkova wrote on her Telegram channel. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has commented on the details of Paievska’s release. Meanwhile, the fate of the hundreds of captured fighters who defended the Azovstal steel plant remains uncertain after they were transferred to prisons in Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine a month ago. Citing an anonymous Russian law enforcement source, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported on Sunday that several Azov regiments had been transferred to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow for questioning. “Other officers from various Ukrainian units have also been transferred to Russia,” TASS quoted the source as saying. Earlier this month, Ukraine’s intelligence service said it had contacted fighters arrested at the Azovstal plant and that Kyiv was doing everything it could to secure their return. There are concerns that Moscow may classify Azov fighters as terrorists – increasing the likelihood of a mass demonstration trial to justify the Russian invasion.
