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“When we try to send aid, the Russian military forces target us,” explains Tania, a 35-year-old charity PR manager in Ukraine. Prior to the Russian invasion, her day-to-day job consisted of coordinating medicine and equipment for Ukrainian maternity hospitals. Now, with the city of Mariupol under siege, her job is becoming impossible.
The Russian military bombardment of Mariupol has produced untold horrors, evidenced through images of heavily pregnant women fleeing hospitals. For Tania, who is based in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine (over a thousand kilometres from Mariupol), the most difficult part has “not being able to help those who need it.
“We don’t know what’s happening in the city. There are at least five other cities that have no power, and we’ve no news from the government or people on the ground.”
Speaking to GLAMOUR’s contributing editor Anne-Marie Tomchak, Tania explains how pregnant women are being devastatingly impacted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I’ve worked for the charity platform Dobro.ua for nine years now. It’s similar to JustGiving – we help over 120 charity partners raise funds for a range of different causes. My current role is as a PR and communications manager. Just before the war, I’d been on vacation abroad and I’d literally only been back in Ukraine for a day when the invasion started (on 24th February).
For two whole days, my colleagues and I were in shock. We didn’t know how we could continue to do our work. With war comes total chaos.
For years, my work has involved getting medicine and equipment to the maternity hospitals of Ukraine, including Mariupol. But when the war started, hospitals were targeted and all the materials and equipment were destroyed. Women in Mariupol were going into labour in underground bunkers as it was literally the only safe place to give birth. After the maternity hospital in Mariupol was attacked we no longer had a hospital. It’s devastating.
Russian TV claimed that the hospital hadn’t been operational for two years and that there were no people or medical equipment inside. It was all lies. Every day I spoke with the great doctors who were saving lives there. They love children and they love people. And the equipment was modern and state of the art. This hospital had sponsors and donors who’d worked tirelessly to support it for years. In one moment all of this was gone.
The Russian Federation also tried to deny the authenticity of the images of the attack on social media. It claimed that there were no women or doctors in the hospital at the time and suggested that the images of women being stretchered out were just staged. They claimed it was just like a film production and that all of the women in the photos were models or actresses.
Putin’s supporters on social media also attacked one woman online. On Sunday (13 March) Mariana Vishegirskaya gave birth to a baby daughter and she received abusive comments on Instagram with claims saying “you’re a model”, “you’re a b*tch”, “this was all staged and it is not true.”