Amid the worst of the destruction, rescuers rush to carry an injured woman out of harm’s way. Her leg and abdomen are injured, and her face is pale. She holds her stomach with a stare. The woman is heavily pregnant and one of the victims of last week’s merciless Putin attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol. The photo of her rescue went around the world.
But the woman and her baby didn’t make it. The AP news agency is now reporting on the heartbreaking scenes that unfolded in a hospital after the attack, as a team of doctors fought to save the life of the woman and her baby.
Because of the woman’s serious injuries, the baby had to be delivered by caesarean section. But according to the surgeon Timur Marin, it showed “no signs of life”. He had previously determined that the woman’s pelvis had been crushed in the rocket attack and that she had sustained other serious abdominal injuries.
The moments immediately after the birth show the mother’s unbelievable pain. When she learned that her baby had not survived the attack, the woman is said to have shouted to the doctors, according to the AP: “Kill me!” After all, she succumbed to her serious injuries. Surgeon Marin: “More than 30 minutes of resuscitation of the mother brought no results. Both died.”
The fate of the unknown woman and her baby reveals the relentless horror of the Russian invasion. The attack last Wednesday had caused worldwide horror. For example, she wrote Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Twitter: “There are few things more abhorrent than targeting the weak and defenseless.”
After the death of the woman and her baby, the father finally came to the hospital to pick her up. In doing so, the two at least escaped the fate of many other victims of ending up in one of the mass graves that were dug in the city after the attacks, the hospital said.
Mariupol is the hardest hit city in the war that lasted more than two weeks. Last week, Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlow declared: “The city actually no longer exists.”
Escape routes have been cut off, negotiations on escape corridors have failed so far, and electricity and water supplies are cut off. The insidious attack on the maternity hospital was condemned by Ukraine President Zelenskyj as a “war crime”.
The Russian side denied responsibility and instead fabricated a hair-raising account of the events: Ukrainian extremists holed up in the clinic to use the hospital as a base. No patients or paramedics were left at the hospital. Russia’s ambassador to the UN and the Russian embassy in London described the images as “fake news”.
But the real images of the horror, which were observed by the AP journalists, among others, of course debunk this version as a lie: they documented the damage and saw countless pregnant and seriously injured mothers-to-be who fled or had to be brought to safety by paramedics.