Russia bombs a maternity hospital? Marianna and the new incubator lie

Western media report indignantly about an alleged Russian attack on a maternity clinic in Mariupol. However, the "victims" are actors, as anyone can easily verify.

The following is an auto-translation of the original article by Thomas Röper published by Anti-Spiegel.

of anti-mirror

March 10, 2022 1:22 PM

Russian forces reported on March 7 that the Mariupol maternity hospital, now allegedly being bombed by Russian forces, had been evacuated and turned into a base for the Azov Battalion. So we have two versions of the story: the government in Kyiv accuses Russia of bombing a maternity hospital, Russia says it was a staged propaganda event. Let's go in search of clues.

May I introduce: Marianna

Photos circulating in the media show a pregnant woman being evacuated from the maternity hospital.

Also shown are images of a pregnant woman being carried away on a stretcher. If you look closely, you will see that it is the same young woman.

However, she was changed. After leaving the hospital that had just been bombed, was a pregnant woman changed on the street before being placed on a stretcher and taken to the ambulance? ( Author's note: I first wrote that you can see her pajamas, which was a mistake, as readers have shown me by enlarging the photo. I apologize for that. However, the enlargement of the photos clearly shows that that it is the same woman )

Is that realistic considering the shock and injuries to be expected in such a situation? We'll soon see how that went, because we'll see the young woman again.

First of all, the question arises: Who is the woman actually? Her name is Marianna and she is a beauty blogger from Mariupol, that is, a photo model. Anyone can see her account on Instagram by searching for "gixie_beauty".

The empty hospital

Ukrainian President Zelensky posted a video from the maternity hospital on Telegram, filmed immediately after the explosion, as can be seen from the fires still burning and the time of the post. The video is shocking, but it has one flaw: it shows the devastated interior of the hospital, but there is no blood, dead or injured anywhere.

Instead, the end of the film tells in Russian that the Russian Air Force has just bombed a maternity clinic. And to add drama to the apparently empty building, he yells, "Is anyone here?"

In the case of the damage shown in the video, all patients and employees who were on the side with the destroyed windows in a hospital that was in operation, since these were patient rooms, would have been seriously injured or killed by the flying panes and splinters. But there is neither sacrifice nor blood.

Das Propaganda-Video

A video of the explosion and the minutes after was released on YouTube. Any professional can tell that the video was taken with a professional camera with a stabilizer, a cell phone video would be totally shaky, especially in the scenes where the cameraman is walking.

By the way, Marianna can be seen again on the cover photo, we'll get to that in a moment. First to other details of the very interesting video. In minute 0.45 it is shown how Marianna is carried down the stairs on the stretcher, which she herself walked down in her pajamas in the first photo shown above. For comparison here again Marianna in her pajamas on the stairs.

Here she is then carried down the same stairs on a stretcher

You can see that Marianna is lying on the stretcher in the next shot when she is being carried out of the hospital.

And of course you can also recognize Marianna in the photo shown above, which was taken by another photographer. Different shots are shown in the video and her stomach is pixelated in the video. So there must have been a lot of cameras and cameras. The camera follows Marianna to the ambulance.

stage directions

There are more scenes in the video, which is only three and a half minutes long, showing that this is a staged video. For example, at minute 1.31 a woman with a child in her arms (which is also very calm and not crying) calmly comes out of the maternity hospital. She's not at all in a state of panic, as one should expect after an incident like this. Instead, she calmly asks in Russian, "And where should I go?"

There are more such scenes that are strange. For example, in minute 1.42 a boy comes out of the hospital calmly, but in minute 1.50 he suddenly cries hysterically and is calmed down by a soldier before he goes back to the hospital. Why are he and the others going back to the hospital they just "escaped" from after an airstrike? To re-film the coming out?

The soldier is also interesting, by the way, because in minute 0.40 he bandages a woman's head in a completely unprofessional manner, while he looks frantically in the direction of the camera as if to make sure that he's doing everything right. But what's the point of a soldier bandaging a head if it's a hospital where there are masses of doctors and nurses who can do it much better than he can?

Marianna is everywhere

By the way, we see Marianna again in minute 2.09. This time, as seen on the video's cover, she is wrapped in a blanket in front of the hospital. She was taken to an ambulance on a stretcher, and the whole way from the stretcher was filmed: down the stairs (which she herself had previously walked down in her pyjamas), across the destroyed forecourt to the ambulance. And suddenly she's standing in front of the hospital again, this time wrapped in a blanket.

From minute 2.13 our soldier is back. This time he tells the cameraman what happened and how they evacuate the injured.

Always at the "right" time

Anyone can see without too much trouble that the footage of the alleged Russian attack is staged. And they came at a suitable time, because Selensky begged for a no-fly zone from NATO again on the same day, when a Russian bombing raid on a maternity clinic came at just the right time to "strengthen the argument".

There's a system to that, because we all remember the big explosion in Kharkiv, the images of which the media showed for days. Conveniently, that also came immediately before Selensky addressed the EU Parliament in a dramatic speech .

The story about the “maternity clinic” reminds me of the incubator lie . Incidents in maternity hospitals, attacks on defenseless newborns, shock everyone and turn off rational thinking. This is exactly the purpose of propaganda: it should unleash emotions and create the desired atmosphere, including the image of the enemy.

War propaganda instead of critical journalism

If it is so easy to show that the alleged airstrike on the "maternity hospital" was a staged story by the Ukrainian government, why can't the "journalists" of Western "quality media" do it? Or to put it another way: Why doesn't a "quality journalist" explain to me why it wasn't a fake and how Marianna, as a "pitiable victim" of the Russian air attack, appears three times in different roles in the video that is supposed to prove the alleged Russian attack?

This is war propaganda at its finest, following the rules set out in the War Propaganda Guide . This obeys Rule 5, which states: “The enemy knowingly commits atrocities”

✦✦✦

Published by RT:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denied Ukrainian claims that Russian troops had shelled an operating maternity hospital in Ukraine. The building had been used as a base by the far-right Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, the top Russian diplomat claimed on Thursday, during a press conference in Turkey.

The hospital in question has been for days under the control of a Ukrainian paramilitary group and Moscow presented evidence of this to the UN Security Council several days ago, Lavrov said.

“The Azov Battalion and other radicals kicked out all the expectant mothers, the nurses and other staff members. It was the base of the Azov ultra-radicals,” he said, speaking after meeting his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in Turkey’s Antalya.

Lavrov added that reports coming from Ukraine that contradict this were obviously meant to “manipulate global public opinion” about what is happening in the country, and he also chastised Western media for taking part in the propaganda effort.

“I have seen reports … that were really emotional. Unfortunately, the other side of the situation, which would allow one to form an objective opinion, was not given any prominence,” Lavrov said.

Read more:

WHO warns Ukraine conflict creating ‘worst possible’ health conditions

The Russian diplomat was commenting on claims raised by Ukraine that Russian troops had deliberately attacked a medical facility in the city of Mariupol on Wednesday. Ukrainian officials claimed that a Russian airstrike had injured at least 17 people but killed nobody.

Footage from the scene showed a heavily damaged building with broken medical equipment scattered inside and Ukrainian troops helping women, some of them carrying infants in their arms, who were implied to be survivors of a bombing.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address on Wednesday that the incident proved that Russia was conducting a genocide of the Ukrainian people and called on other nations to stop Russian atrocities.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier on Thursday commented on the allegations, suggesting the details are rather vague and it’s better to prompt the Russian military for details.

“We will definitely ask our military. You and I don’t have definitive information about what had happened there,” he told journalists.