Pregnant Ukrainian blogger got death threats after Russia accused her of being crisis actor
The Ukrainian woman pictured heavily pregnant and covered in blood as she fled a blown-up maternity hospital has revealed that she got bombarded with death threats after Russia accused her of being a crisis actor.
Marianna Vyshemirsky, 29, became a viral image of the brutality of war when she was photographed looking shellshocked and bloodied as she fled the despicable March blast in Mariupol.
But Russian officials accused the beauty blogger of using her makeup skills to fake her injuries, sparking a torrent of hate, she told the BBC in her first interview with a major Western outlet.
“I received threats that they would come and find me, that I would be killed, that my child would be cut into pieces,” she told the UK outlet.
She found the accusations “really offensive” because “I actually lived through it all,” she said of the bombing that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned as an “atrocity” and a “war crime.”
Vyshemirsky, who blogged under the name Marianna Podgurskaya, had excitedly shared updates on her pregnancy ahead of Russia’s invasion.
“We had a quiet and simple life … and then, of course, things were turned upside down,” she told the BBC.
She said the sound of the March 9 blast as she awaited giving birth ended up “ringing in my ears for a very long time.”
“You could hear everything flying around, shrapnel and stuff,” she recalled to the British broadcaster.
Vyshemirsky, whose surname has also been spelled Vishegirskaya in wire reports, said she suffered a forehead cut with glass fragments lodged in her skin, but a doctor told her she didn’t need stitches.
She was photographed while retrieving her possessions from the ruins of the hospital. “Everything I had prepared for my baby was in that maternity ward,” she said.
Days later, she was photographed in a different Ukrainian hospital having given birth to her daughter, Veronika.
“She chose to show up at a difficult time … but it’s better she arrived under these circumstances than not at all,” she told the BBC.
Having moved to a secret new location, Vyshemirsky has returned to blogging, recently sharing pictures of her baby daughter’s hand and telling people to only follow if they are interested in “cosmetics, nappies and the everyday life of a new mom.”
She also addressed those sending her hate, saying she had “no room for insults in my soul.”
Her war ordeal has also changed how she lives life, she told the outlet, saying, “For now I’m not thinking about my hopes or making plans, because we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”
