On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets.
Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country. NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya.
But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.
The new testimony (watch below) comes on the heels of evidence strongly suggesting that the destruction of a dramatic theater in Mariupol on March 16 was staged by the Azov Battalion, and that nearly all civilians had evacuated a day before. And as we will see below, new reports of a Russian massacre of scores of civilians in the town of Bucha also contain suspicious details suggesting a pattern of information manipulation aimed at triggering Western military intervention.
I can’t include the entire video of hers. You can find it in the link to the article. The first part of the video she starts off by quickly explaining her life and how she came to live in Mariupol. Then she gets into the living conditions in Mariupol, how they eventually had no gas, electricity, or anything else. They also were prevented by leaving, and she knew one woman who stepped on a mine while trying to leave.
This woman, Marianna Vyshemirskaya, was heavily pregnant, and she had to go to the hospital to give birth on March 6th. The original maternity hospital they went to was taken over by the Ukrainian Army.
The husbands of these women set up a field hospital in the streets where they could cook them food. Random strangers would bring them things to make for the woman who had just given birth, or were about to give birth. The only contribution of the Ukrainian Army was to steal the women’s food.
Although in fairness, it sounds like they were starving themselves. Such is life in an encirclement. At this point we pick back up with the article, since it describes the explosive incident.
“At that moment we heard an explosion. Instinctively I personally put a duvet on myself. That’s when we heard the second explosion. I got covered by glass partially. I had small cuts on my nose, under my lips and at the top of my forehead but it was nothing serious…”
Mariana Vishegirskaya, a pregnant resident of Donetsk who was present at the maternity hospital during the widely reported incident, has evacuated from Mariupol and is now speaking out. Photos showing a bloodied Vishnevskaya fleeing the building with her personal belongings became a centerpiece of coverage of the attack, along with a photo of another woman being carried away pale and unconscious on a stretcher.
As she waited, she noticed “a soldier with a helmet” taking pictures of her, and demanded he stop, “because obviously it was not a good time for that,” and she did not want to be photographed in her current state. The soldier complied. Back upstairs, the same individual began filming her and others again, refusing to stop until his subjects had demanded several times he do so.
Vishegirskaya’s husband later told her the man wasn’t a soldier, but an Associated Press correspondent, one of many on the scene at the time. She believes these journalists had been there “from the beginning,” as they were ready and waiting outside to snap the woman being led away on a stretcher, the first to emerge from the building in the wake of the shell attack, “as soon as she came out.”
As mentioned previously, I’m not going to commit to any narrative unless I know for sure what actually happened here. Having said that, the timeline is really weird and offputting. Supposedly there’s some airstrike on this maternity hospital. Then, as the woman walk out, they are greeted with throngs of propagandists who are already in exactly the right spot, with cameras shoved in their faces.
The next day, after her baby was delivered via cesarean section, the same Associated Press staffers interviewed her, asking her to describe what happened. They enquired point blank if an airstrike had taken place, to which she responded, “no, even the people that were on the streets didn’t hear anything, nor did anyone.”
Later, when she was in safer “ living conditions,” Vishegirskaya began scouring the internet, attempting to track down the interview. She found “everything else” the Associated Press staffers recorded – but not her denials that an airstrike had occurred.
I don’t know what actually happened here. We know from her interview that there were Ukrainian troops using most of the hospital. So even if this was an airstrike, unfortunate though it would be, it was aimed at a military target.
But then we get all these journalists waiting around in exactly the right spot, and they refuse to show anyone video of her saying that it wasn’t an airstrike. A message that she had been told by the Ukrainian military, and was somewhat verified by none of them hearing any planes. They also didn’t hear any incoming artillery.
None of this is conclusive evidence of what actually happened, but it is yet another example of an extremely shady propaganda push that has moved on from pretending that video games are real and pushing the Shadow of Kiev.
Whatever the truth of the matter, other aspects of Vishegirskaya’s newly released testimony relate to major mysteries surrounding the Mariupol maternity hospital bombing. For example, she affectingly attests that the pregnant woman stretchered out of the building died. Yet for all the superficial damage inflicted, no photo or video evidence yet to emerge from the scene – bar a seemingly blood-soaked mattress – indicates how and where the fatal injuries could have been inflicted.
Even more curiously, the Associated Press implausibly claimed that due to “chaos after the airstrike,” no one on the ground learned the dead woman’s name before her husband arrived to collect her body – her identity remains unknown to this day. Still, doctors were “grateful” the nameless woman did not end up buried in one of the mass graves dug for Mariupol’s dead.
So the one woman who died is a mystery woman? No one knows who she was, not even her husband? How does that make any sense at all?
The wall to wall flood of bullshit from the WMD Liars has made following this war the most confusing and annoying experience of my life. Punctuated only by occasional moments of hilarity.
