A celebrated Ukrainian medic whose footage was smuggled out of the besieged city of Mariupol by an Associated Press team was freed by Russian forces on Friday, three months after she was taken captive on the streets of the city.Yuliia Paievska is known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she chose in the World of Warcraft video game. Using a body camera, she recorded 256 gigabytes of her team’s efforts over two weeks to save the wounded, including both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.She transferred the clips to an Associated Press team, the last international journalists in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, one of whom fled with it embedded in a tampon on March 15. Taira and a colleague were taken prisoner by Russian forces on March 16, the same day a Russian airstrike hit a theater in the city center, killing around 600 people, according to an Associated Press investigation.“It was such a great sense of relief. Those sound like such ordinary words, and I don't even know what to say,” her husband, Vadim Puzanov, told The Associated Press late Friday, breathing deeply to contain his emotion. Puzanov said he spoke by phone with Taira, who was en route to a Kyiv hospital, and feared for her health.Initially the family had kept quiet, hoping negotiations would take their course. But The Associated Press spoke with him before releasing the smuggled videos, which ultimately had millions of viewers around the world, including on some of the biggest networks in Europe and the United States. Puzanov expressed gratitude for the coverage, which showed Taira was trying to save Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainian civilians.In a short video posted Saturday on Telegram, Taira thanked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for his efforts to get her released. Addressing Ukrainians still held by Russia, with a catch in her voice, she said: “I know that everything will work out and we will all be home as I am now.”Zelenskyy had announced Taira's release in a national address.“I'm grateful to everyone who worked for this result. Taira is already home. We will keep working to free everyone,” he said.Hundreds of prominent Ukrainians have been kidnapped or captured, including local officials, journalists, activists and human rights defenders.Russia portrayed Taira as working for the nationalist Azov Regiment, in line with Moscow’s narrative that it is attempting to “denazify” Ukraine. But the AP found no such evidence, and friends and colleagues said she had no links to Azov, which made a last stand in a Mariupol steel plant before hundreds of its fighters were captured or killed.The footage itself is a visceral testament to her efforts to save the wounded on both sides.A clip recorded on March 10 shows two Russian soldiers taken roughly out of an ambulance by a Ukrainian soldier. One is in a wheelchair. The other is on his knees, hands bound behind his back, with an obvious leg injury. Their eyes are covered by winter hats, and they wear white armbands.A Ukrainian soldier curses at one of them. “Calm down, calm down,” Taira tells him.A woman asks her, “Are you going to treat the Russians?”“They will not be as kind to us,” she replies. “But I couldn’t do otherwise. They are prisoners of war.”Taira was a member of the Ukraine Invictus Games for military veterans, where she was set to compete in archery and swimming. Invictus said she was a military medic from 2018 to 2020 but had since been demobilized.She received the body camera in 2021 to film for a Netflix documentary series on inspirational figures being produced by Britain’s Prince Harry, who founded the Invictus Games. But when Russian forces invaded, she used it to shoot scenes of injured civilians and soldiers instead.

Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital in the early hours of Sunday morning, striking at least two residential buildings, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, as elsewhere Russian troops consolidated their gains in the east.Associated Press journalists in Kyiv saw rescue services battling flames and rescuing civilians. Klitschko said four people were hospitalized with injuries and a 7-year-old girl was pulled alive from the rubble. Culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko said on Telegram that a kindergarten was hit in the attacks.Ukraine Member of Parliament Oleksiy Goncharenko wrote on the Telegram messaging app that “according to prelim data 14 missiles were launched against Kyiv region and Kyiv.” Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ignat said the missiles were Kh-101 air-launched cruise missiles fired from planes over the Caspian Sea.Before Sunday’s early morning attack, Kyiv had not faced any such Russian airstrikes since June 5.Klitschko told journalists that he believed “it is maybe a symbolic attack” ahead of this week's NATO summit in Madrid.Two more explosions were later heard in Kyiv, but their cause and possible casualties were not immediately clear.President Joe Biden, asked for his reaction to Russian missile strikes Sunday on Kyiv, said: “It’s more of their barbarism,” as he stood with Olaf Scholz as the German chancellor greeted leaders arriving to open the Group of Seven summit.Meanwhile, Russian forces have been seeking to swallow up the last remaining Ukrainian stronghold in the eastern Luhansk region, pressing their momentum after taking full control Saturday of the charred ruins of Sievierodonetsk and the chemical plant where hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians had been holed up.Serhiy Haidai, governor of the Luhansk region that includes Sievierodonetsk, said Sunday that Russia was conducting intense airstrikes on the adjacent city of Lysychansk, destroying its television tower and seriously damaging a road bridge.“There's very much destruction — Lysychansk is almost unrecognizable,” he wrote on Facebook.Also Sunday, U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States and other Group of Seven leading economies intend to announce a ban on imports of gold from Russia. They hope that measure will further isolate Russia economically over its invasion of Ukraine.Senior Biden administration officials said gold is Moscow’s second largest export after energy, and that banning imports would make it more difficult for Russia to participate in global markets.Biden’s Twitter feed said Russia “rakes in tens of billions of dollars” from the sale of its gold, its second largest export after energy.On Saturday, Russia also launched dozens of missiles on several areas across the country far from the heart of the eastern battles. Some of the missiles were fired from Russian long-range Tu-22 bombers deployed from Belarus for the first time, Ukraine’s air command said.The bombardment preceded a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, during which Putin announced that Russia planned to supply Belarus with the Iskander-M missile system.Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said late Saturday that Russian and Moscow-backed separatist forces now control Sievierodonetsk and the villages surrounding it. He said the attempt by Ukrainian forces to turn the Azot plant into a “stubborn center of resistance” had been thwarted.Haidai confirmed Saturday that Sievierodonetsk had fallen to Russian and separatist fighters, who he said were now trying to blockade Lysychansk from the south.Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted a spokesman for the separatist forces, Andrei Marochko, as saying Russian troops and separatist fighters had entered Lysychansk and that fighting was taking place in the heart of the city. There was no immediate comment on the claim from the Ukrainian side.Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk have been the focal point of a Russian offensive aimed at capturing all of the Donbas and destroying the Ukrainian military defending it — the most capable and battle-hardened segment of the country’s armed forces.Capturing Lysychansk would give Russian forces control of every major settlement in the province, a significant step toward Russia’s aim of capturing the entire Donbas. The Russians and separatists control about half of Donetsk, the second province in the Donbas.