Pregnant woman holding her belly in viral photos of Mariupol maternity attack dies | International

His image lying on a stretcher, bloodied, with a lost look and in shock, clutching her belly in an advanced state of pregnancy, she went around the world and became the most terrible face of the war in Ukraine. The woman had survived the Russian attack on the Mariupol maternity hospital in southeastern Ukraine, which occurred last Wednesday, and she was being rushed to another hospital. This Monday, according to The Associated Press agency, it has been known that both she and her baby have died.

Despite the efforts of the emergency services that transferred her to another health facility, nothing could be done. In this second hospital, near the line of combat between the Ukrainians and Russians, a team of doctors, according to the AP account, tried to keep her alive. The surgeon Timur Marin has told the US agency that the woman had a shattered pelvis and a dislocated hip. It was then that they performed an emergency caesarean section, but the baby was born “with no signs of life”. When the woman realized that she was going to lose the baby, she shouted: “Kill me now.”

The mother died after more than 30 minutes of attempts to revive her, Marin told the AP, who has assured that they could not identify her in the midst of the chaos that occurred after the bombing of the Mariupol hospital where three people died, including a girl, and 17 others were injured. The woman’s father and husband have gone to collect the mortal remains at the hospital. “At least someone has come and has not ended up in the common grave of the city,” the doctors have said.

The baby born from the ruins

Mariana Vishegirskaya, a 19-year-old girl, is the other visible face of this tragedy. She managed to walk out of the Mariupol hospital. She also bloodied and dazed she was transferred to another center where last Friday, two days after the attack, she gave birth to her daughter Veronika, a survivor of hers as her mother of the bombs.

When the image of Mariana Vishegirskaya in the hospital began to circulate, going down a staircase through rubble and with a plastic bag in her hand, the Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom reacted by stating that it was a montage and that the woman in the photo it was one influencer named Marianna Podgurskaya. She claimed to Russia that she had been made up to look like a victim and that the photograph was staged. Twitter removed two posts from the Russian Embassy claiming that images shared by the Ukrainian government of the Russian bombing of a hospital were staged. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after the bombing of the Mariupol mother-and-child hospital that it was the base of an alleged neo-Nazi Ukrainian battalion.

Follow all the international information in Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.