” I was wrong. » After his polemical statements early September, questioning the seriousness of the Russian bombardment of the Mariupol maternity hospital, the former socialist minister Ségolène Royal finally admitted a mistake.
This declaration, exploited on Russian television, had provoked a wave of indignation within the French political class and up to the surroundings Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Because, as many have recalled, the abuses committed by the Russian army since the start of the war in Ukraine have been documented by journalists. Especially the bombing of the Mariupol maternity hospital.
But Russian propaganda has been there. Nearly six months after the end of the siege of the city, now controlled by Russia, the speeches denying the involvement of the Kremlin in the attack on the Mariupol maternity hospital continue.
A bombardment that remained in everyone’s mind
A large industrial and strategic city in south-eastern Ukraine, Mariupol was quickly targeted by Russian airstrikes from the start of the war, on February 24. His siege will last almost three months. Destroyed at 90%, the city has become a martyr city, symbol of a barbaric strategy of the Russian occupier. The human toll remains difficult to establish, but the Ukrainian authorities mentioned in April at least 20,000 dead.
Several tragic episodes punctuated this siege, such as the March 16 bombardment of a theater in which hundreds of people had taken refuge. But the explosion affecting a maternity hospital, a week earlier, on March 9, constituted the proof, wrote then The Wall Street Journalthat the Russian invasion was “entry into a new phase, more destructive, targeting civilian populations”. This attack has even been described as ” war crime “ by the European Union.
The precious images of Associated Press journalists…
Few journalists were present the day of the attack. The majority of them, fearing being trapped by the advancing Russian troops, had already left Mariupol. But two journalists from the American agency Associated Press (AP) were there: photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and journalist Мstyslav Chernov. In a long testimonythe latter reported what he saw of the bombing of the maternity ward:
“I saw the fireball for a split second, before the pain stabbed my inner ear, my skin, my face. Smoke rose above a maternity ward. When we arrived, rescuers were still pulling bloody pregnant women from the rubble. »
Several videos have been published, including one on the day of the bombing:
AP journalists filmed the damage caused by the Russian army: we see bloody mattresses, the deep crater caused by the explosion, the personnel and the women evacuated in emergency. Authorities affirmed while seventeen people were injured and three died. Among them, an injured pregnant woman, transported on a stretcher to another hospital, whose photo has gone around the world.
On March 14, AP published new images filmed in the hospital where the pregnant woman was transferred. Neither she nor her child did not survive. In this sequence appears a second woman, injured during the attack, but who was able to give birth to a healthy child.
The report by AP journalists on the Mariupol maternity hospital was praised by the profession and photographer Evgeniy Maloletka received the Visa d’or News at the Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan in early September. In addition to this work, there is that of other journalists, such as a team from France 2 who met young mothers who survived maternity in Apriland in the month of June.
… instrumentalized by Russian propaganda
On the Russian side, the bombardment was legitimate and justified by the presence of a nationalist battalion in the maternity ward. “It no longer housed patients, but extremists. It had been seized by the Azov battalion and other radicals. All the caregivers had been expelled,” assured, the next day, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov.
Meanwhile, photos of bloodied pregnant women have sparked global outrage. Like the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who condemned “an unworthy act of war”. The Moscow version therefore evolved into a Secondly and this strike is then qualified as “a show whose sole purpose is to maintain anti-Russian agitation in Western public opinion”.
The Kremlin targets a young woman present during the explosion, Marianna Vishegirskaya, photographed by an AP journalist, while she was evacuating the rubble in an emergency. The pro-Russian argument claims that she would not be pregnant, but disguised to play comedy. Another version assures that she was actually the woman lying on a stretcher, whose death the doctors announced shortly after her evacuation. Journalists nevertheless find Marianna Vishegirskaya’s Instagram account where she poses with her companion, her belly rounded. This version of the facts is also contradicted by the AP report dated March 14, where we see the young woman alongside her baby a few hours after giving birth.
But these elements of language continue to be relayed online by several Russian embassies who judge his “very realistic makeup” and ensure that“She could not be in the maternity ward because, at the time of the strike, there were no staff or patients since they were forced to evacuate the premises by a nationalist battalion which had set up a firing post there”. Facebook and Twitter have removed posts from the Russian Embassy in the UK. But the poison of disinformation had instilled itself: six months later, the controversy caused by Ségolène Royal caused this version of the story to resurface on social networks.
The Marianna Vishegirskaya case
The alleged false pregnancy of the young Ukrainian is not the only element to have fueled this alternative narrative dictated by Moscow. The testimony of Marianna Vishegirskaya on a pro-Russian Youtube channel, in April, denying any Russian airstrikes and criticizing AP reporters, caused trouble. However, Ukrainian specialists agree that the young woman would have been manipulated to testify under duress. This is a technique well known to Russian disinformation techniques. In 2016, Omrane Daqneesh, the boy whose bloody and dusty face became the symbol of the battle for Aleppo in Syria, reappeared in a video by the Russian channel Ruptly. His father defended the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, supported by Russia, and accused the Western media of having instrumentalized his son for propagandist purposes.
Today, Marianna Vishegirskaya still seems to live in Mariupol, a city now controlled by Russian forces. She reappeared in early September in a video relayed by pro-Moscow spheres, where she distributes balloons in the colors of Russia to schoolchildren.
Remember Mariana Vishegirskaya? The maternity ward woman whom Ukraine used for their propaganda lies back in March… https://t.co/yseLA1YWMo
“The famous ‘pregnant woman who died with her child’ from the ‘bombed Maternity Hospital in Mariupol’ that the media are talking about is actually alive and well. Marianna Vishegirskaya has become a school teacher in Mariupol free of Ukrainian neo-Nazis! », can we read on social networks. Proof if there is one that Moscow does not intend to stop exploiting the story of this young woman to continue to propagate her alternative narrative of the facts.