The Hero of Ukraine, Yuliia Paievska

"The Russians told me it was best to commit suicide because they would kill me anyway, but I tried to believe I would survive."

"I had absolutely no information about what was happening in the world. I didn't even know if my family was alive or if our house had survived because the Russians were almost already in Kyiv when we left."

"They said that no one supports us, that other countries only give us old, rusty weapons."

"They said that no one needed us and that everyone had long forgotten about Ukraine."

Yuliia Paievska, Team Ukraine Invictus Games competitor, volunteer paramedic

This undated image provided by the Invictus Games Team Ukraine shows Yuliia Paievska, known as Taira, a celebrated Ukrainian medic who used a body camera to record her work in Mariupol while the port city was under Russian siege.  Invictus Games Team Ukraine / AP

 

Before she was captured by Russian forces three months ago, Yuliia Paievska was serving as a volunteer paramedic on the Mariupol front line. Before the February 24 invasion she had been training to compete at the Invictus Games in swimming, archery and power-lifting. After she was incarcerated by the Russian military, her 19-year-old daughter, Anna-Sofia Puzanova took her mother's place in the archery competition, where she won a bronze medal.

Yuliia Paievska began her paramedic career on the Donbas front line in 2014. She had recently retrained as a medic for the specific purpose of helping in the Donbas.She became famous for helping injured servicemen, having reportedly saved an estimated 500 Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas. 

 

Her greatest accomplishment was training 8,000 people in the practise of tactical medicine where treatment was given to wounded separatists and Russians as well as Ukrainian military. The nation's highest civilian honour became hers in recognition of her dedication and sacrifice for her country.

 

Paievska watches as emergency personnel work on a patient on March 2 in Mariupol. (Yuliia Paievska/The Associated Press)

 

During one evacuation operation she was injured and ended up having titanium hip replacements which left her in chronic pain. She was ambushed on March 18 when she and a colleague drove an ambulance through a humanitarian corridor. She described being placed into solitary confinement where medication for her thyroid and asthma was withheld. During that time she was permitted a half-glass of water daily.

She was eventually moved to a ten-foot by twenty-foot cell which held over twenty women. There, the 53-year-old underwent "beatings and torture with electricity". For that three-month period, she was tortured and given to believe that not only had Ukraine ceased its existence, but she would be killed, as well.

"Ab crunches, yoga and meditation. I tried to keep fit in jail. I think if  you can convince yourself to survive, you will."

"I had no reason to think that I would get out, because they were determined to shoot me, kill me."

"But for some reason I knew, I believed that I would survive."

Yuliia Paievska, recipient of Hero of Ukraine medal

Smoke and flame rise after a strike on a chemical plant in Severodonetsk, Donbas region. The city has been under siege by Russian forces and hundreds are sheltering in the plant. (Oleksandr Ratushniak/Reuters)

Yet Another Russian War Crime Qualifying It As A Terrorist State

"The political leadership of Ukraine decided to use U.S.-produced multiple-launch rocket systems HIMARS to carry out a strike here to veil the crimes that the Ukrainian captives started talking about."

Eduard Basurin, spokesman, 'Donetsk Peoples' Republic' separatists

"The occupiers' attack on Olenivka is a deliberate war crime by the Russians, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war."

"There should be a clear legal recognition of Russia as a terrorist state."

"Russia has proven with numerous terrorist attacks that it is the biggest source of terrorism in today's world."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

 

"The Armed Forces of Ukraine did not launch missile and artillery strikes in the area of Olenivka settlement. [Russian forces  carried out] a targeted artillery shelling of a correctional institution in the settlement of Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast, where Ukrainian prisoners were held."

"[The armed forces] have never conducted and are not conducting shelling of civilian infrastructure, especially places where combat fellows are likely to be kept as POWs."

"Russian occupiers pursued their criminal goals -- to accuse Ukraine of committing 'war crimes,' as well as to hide the torture of prisoners and executions."

"The alleged shelling of civilian infrastructure and the population by the Armed Forces of Ukraine are outright lies and provocation, the responsibility of which is borne by Russia."

Ukraine General Staff

 

"The Kyiv regime deliberately carried out a bloody provocation; 40 Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed and 75 were wounded. In addition, eight employees of the isolation ward received injuries of varying severity."

"The pre-trial detention center in the area of ​​the settlement of Yelenovka (Olenivka), which contains Ukrainian military prisoners of war, including militants of the Azov formation, was hit by a missile attack from the American HIMARS multiple launch rocket system."

Russian Ministry of Defense

The inside of a pre-trial detention center in the separatist-controlled settlement of Olenivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region is seen on Friday after a purported strike.

There is some question whether a missile strike or an explosion took place in a prison operated by ethnic-Russian Ukrainian rebels where hundreds of Ukrainian prisoners are incarcerated. Initial accounts were that the prison was hit by missiles. A later examination of the prison compound where if missiles were involved no windows would have been left intact -- and they were in a nearby section -- led to the belief that it was an interior explosion that took place. That those guarding the prisoners in its interior were involved.

There were scores of deaths of prisoners reported and many more injured. Both Kyiv and Moscow accused one another of responsibility in the attack and the associated deaths. Given Moscow's record on the veracity and reliability of its word, it isn't too much to suppose that claiming Kyiv to have been responsible can be moved aside as a screen covering the truth. According to Russia's defense ministry, 40 prisoners died  and 75 were wounded, some gravely.

The death toll was increased to 53 by a separatist spokesman. According to the Ukraine armed forces Russian artillery targeted the prison where Ukrainian servicemen suffered mistreatment, to hide their condition from outside sources. Reuters TV captured the interior remains of a cavernous burnt-out building packed with metal beds, where some held charred bodies, other bodies on military stretchers or around the building exterior.

Fragments of U.S.-made HIMARS rockets, according the Russian defence ministry, are shown after the shelling at a pre-trial detention center in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict, in the settlement of Olenivka in the Donetsk Region, Ukraine July 29, 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko

And while fragments of shells were arranged on a bench as proof of a missile attack, no identifying markings were detectable, and nor could it be proven where the fragments had come from. According to the Ukraine SBU -- its domestic security agency -- telephone calls had been intercepted of Russian separatists' communications whose content hinted that Russian troops had caused an explosion at the prison. A prison where atrocities and brutality are held to have been carried out against Ukrainian prisoners.

According to Ukrainian military intelligence, an explosion took place in a new building purposed to house prisoners from the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol where the militias defending the ruined town were represented in large part by the Azov battalion, a currently resurrected military group whose original during World War Two had an unsavoury past, with a reputation of committed fascists who worked alongside the German SS in rounding up and murdering Jews. 

The building, according to Ukraine intelligence, was blown up by the mercenary Russian private military Wagner Group. The hundreds of civilians and wounded Ukrainian soldiers besieged, outnumbered and trapped in the Azovstal steelworks determined despite all odds to fight off the Russian attackers, finally surrendered on order of President Zelenskyy for the purpose of saving their lives with the Russians closing in. 

Online video footage, according to the SBU, showed windows in some rooms intact, suggesting an explosion from within instead of shelling from without. The separatists had their own story, that the PoWs had begun revealing crimes conducted by the Ukraine military, which led Kyiv to order the prison bombed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is quoted as having told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Russia would realize all the goals of its "special military operation", and that Western arms supplies to Ukraine were only prolonging the conflict.

 

A satellite image shows a closer view of a prison in Olenivka, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, Ukraine July 27, 2022. Satellite image 2022 Maxar Technologies/Handout via REUTERS

"According to available information, [the explosions] were carried out by mercenaries from the Wagner [League] PMC under the personal command of the nominal owner of the specified PMC -- Evgeniy Prigozhin."

"The organization and execution of the terrorist attack were not coordinated with the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation."

Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense