DISINFO: Ukrainian Nazis were occupying the bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol
SUMMARY
Ukrainian model and blogger Marianna Podgurskaya, who turned out to be one of the women documented in the reports about the shelling of maternity hospital No. 1 in Mariupol, said that the nationalists took away food from pregnant women and turned the medical facility into barracks for militants.
In March 2022, unidentified persons from among the military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and volunteer nationalist battalions in Mariupol fired at the maternity hospital building at 36 Pashkovsky Street. After that, they placed equipment and heavy weapons, seized and forcibly kept at least 100 civilians inside the building, including pregnant women and at least 40 children, using them as hostages and human shields, driving them into the basement.
RESPONSE
The disinformation is part of a well-known Kremlin tactics to sow doubt, to obfuscate and deflect responsibility for its horrific acts.
The tragedy described by the disinformation articles occurred on 9 March 2022. Marianna Vyshemirskaya, born Pidgurskaya, is one of the pregnant women featured in the pictures from the bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol, the city that is currently under Russian siege.
Pro-Kremlin media attributes words to Vyshemirsakaya that she did not say. In a heavily edited video that appeared online on 2 April 2022, Vyshemirskaya says that she was hospitalised in maternity hospital number 3. She says she heard that in the maternity hospital number 1, doctors told patients to leave because the military will settle there. It is not clear, to what military she refers to and what exactly happened at maternity hospital number 1, where Vyshemirska was not a direct witness.
Then Vyshemirska explains that she was at the maternity hospital number 3 which was bombed (even if she does not know by what weapons, she did not hear an airstrike). Along with other pregnant women, she was evacuated to a basement and to another hospital where she gave birth a day later. She says, in tears, that she, of course, was not wearing any makeup or greasepaint and that the second pregnant woman from the report died along with the baby (time code 5:11- 5:35 of the video).
The words "I didn't have any makeup or greasepaint" are a reaction to a previous pro-Kremlin narrative. Initially, pro-Kremlin media advanced a version that Vyshemirska "played a role" of a pregnant woman in the "staged" maternity hospital attack. Thus, Komsomolskaya Pravda told its readers that “in all the photographs from the destroyed maternity hospital, the same girl is pictured but in different clothes."
Speaking on Instagram stories (saved and available here) on April 2, Vyshemirska stressed again that there were only pregnant women in the hospital where she was staying.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen backed efforts to investigate reported Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Russia targeted a hospital in Mykolaiv, another hospital in Mariupol, the Luhansk Children's Hospital, a hospital in Volnovakha and the maternity hospital in Mariupol. The International Criminal Court has initiated the process of collecting and analysing all documents available for a future case against the perpetrators.
For more details, see the report "Hospitals and health care workers in Ukraine under attack, a violation of the 1864 Geneva Convention" and read the EUvsDisinfo article about the shelling of Maternity Ward No. 3 in Mariupol.