TALLINN, Harju County —

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.

UNITED NATIONS — The United States says it is expelling 12 Russian diplomats at the United Nations for engaging in activities not in accordance with their responsibilities and obligations as diplomats.

U.S. deputy ambassador Richard Mills confirmed the expulsions after Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the U.N. Security Council on Monday afternoon that he had just been informed of “yet another hostile step undertaken by the host country" against the Russian Mission.

Nebenzia called the U.S. expulsions a “gross violation” of the U.N. agreement with the United States as the host of the United Nations and of the Vienna Convention governing diplomatic relations.

MOSCOW —

“Wars in Europe rarely start on a Wednesday.”

That’s how a top Russian diplomat brushed off speculation in the West that Russia could invade neighboring Ukraine as soon as Wednesday, Feb. 16.

As the U.S. and other NATO members warn of the potential for a devastating war, Russia is not countering with bombs or olive branches — but with sarcasm.

It’s a tool that officials in Moscow have long used to belittle their rivals and to deflect attention from actions seen as threatening to the West or Russia’s neighbors. Laconic quips dovetail with the Kremlin’s domestic agenda by making Russia and its all-powerful president look more cool-headed and clever than countries in the panicky, democratic West.

As worries mushroomed that Wednesday could be the day President Vladimir Putin launches an invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials ridiculed them.

In a Facebook post, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova asked the “mass media of disinformation” in the West “to reveal the schedule of our ‘invasions’ for the upcoming year. I’d like to plan my vacations.”

“To the regret of many Western media, the war again failed to start,” Zakharova said at a briefing on Wednesday. “Fighting has erupted on their pages, but it has no relation to reality.”

Ukrainians, meanwhile, have been living amid signs of a possible invasion for several weeks, with an estimated 150,000 Russian troops surrounding much of their country for military exercises. Russia said this week it was starting to pull back some troops, but Western military officials say there's no evidence of a serious withdrawal.

Russia’s ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, accused Westerners of “slander” for alleging an invasion was afoot. He insisted in an interview with German daily newspaper Welt that “there won’t be an attack this Wednesday.”

Then Chizhov added: “Wars in Europe rarely start on a Wednesday.’”

The statement seemed more flippant than historically significant. World War I started on a Tuesday and World War II started in Europe on a Friday, but Europe's history of war over centuries includes conflicts that kicked off throughout the week.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also took the West's growing fears lightly. Asked Wednesday whether Russia's presidential administration operated differently overnight, he told reporters that everyone slept calmly and resumed work in the morning as usual.

“Western hysteria is still far from its culmination,” Peskov said. "We need to have patience, as the remission will not come quickly.”

The master of Russian diplomatic snark is Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He is known worldwide for his quips – often said in English — over 18 years as the Kremlin’s top diplomat.

On Wednesday, Lavrov mocked the West as sadly "lacking basic upbringing” for trying to dictate or predict Russia’s plans.

Beneath the sarcasm, Russia has narrated the current Ukraine crisis from the outset: first by moving troops toward Ukraine, then by periodically holding out the possibility of a diplomatic solution, keeping foreign officials and global markets on constant edge.

While Putin offered more talks this week, his intentions in Ukraine remain unclear. Western intelligence suggests an invasion of some kind could still happen – on a future Wednesday or any day of the week.

Microsoft now says suspected Russian hackers behind a massive campaign that impacted government agencies, local municipalities and companies were also able to view some of the company’s source code.

In a blog post Thursday, Microsoft says the unauthorized access “has not put at risk the security of our services or any customer data.”

"We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories," Microsoft stated. "The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated."

Source code is the basic building blocks of computer programs, like the instructions.

Last month, as news of the hacking campaign surfaced, Microsoft acknowledged using the IT management software SolarWinds Orion, which is how the attackers gained access to thousands of government, public, and private organizations.

Microsoft has said in earlier blog posts they were aware of clients they serviced who were compromised, Thursday’s update is the first time the company has confirmed the attackers compromised them.

Microsoft says they operate with a philosophy of making source code viewable, and do not rely on secrecy of this code for security. “So viewing source code isn’t tied to elevation of risk,” they stated.