In early April, Denis Seleznyov, a blogger from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), posted a new video on his YouTube channel: an interview with Marianna Vyshemirskaya (who also goes by her maiden name, Podgurskaya). Marianna is a beauty blogger from Donetsk who caught the world’s attention after AP journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Yevgeny Maloletka photographed her at a maternity hospital in Mariupol immediately after it was bombed on March 9, 2022. The Ukrainian authorities reported that the hospital had been hit by a Russian airstrike.
After the photos were published, several pro-Kremlin Telegram channels immediately claimed that they were staged (their “evidence” was that all of the images showed only one woman, Vyshemirskaya, which is not true). Larger pro-government news agencies in Russia soon began repeating the claims. Meduza asked Ilya Ber — editor-in-chief of Provereno Media, which specializes in debunking fake news — to analyze and debunk those early attempts to cast doubt on what happened in Mariupol.
Since Seleznyov published his interview with Vyshemirskaya, Russian propagandists have jumped back on the story — so we asked Ilya Bera to check and see whether Vyshemirskaya's own words revealed anything new. This material is being published jointly by Meduza and Provereno.
Vyshemirskaya confirmed that she was pregnant and was a patient in the maternity wing of Hospital No. 3 in Mariupol...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...