the mother who became the symbol of the bombing of the Mariupol maternity hospital calls to vote for Vladimir Putin

“For me, this choice is obvious,” explains Mariana Vyshegirskaya, nicknamed the “Madonna of Mariupol”, on Instagram.

The photo, broadcast by the American agency Associated Press, went around the world. A young pregnant woman, bloodied and with a haggard look, stands in front of the ruins of a maternity ward in Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, bombed on March 9, 2022 by Russian forces. Her name is Marianna Vyshemirskaya, but the media that tell her story rename her “The Madonna of Mariupol”. A little less than two years later, she spoke again, but this time to show her support for Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, candidate for his re-election.

On Instagram, the Ukrainian announced that she had brought her signature as part of the collection prior to the presidential election. “For me, this choice is obvious”she wrote on January 21, praising the policies and decisions of the outgoing Russian president, thanks to whom “despite sanctions and all problems, Russia is developing dynamically”, according to her.

In the article dedicated to it, the Ukrainian media RBC takes stock of the reactions of Internet users outraged by this support and other insults towards the “Madonna of Mariupol”. According to the daily, Marianna Vyshemirskaya, originally from Donetsk, in the Ukrainian territories controlled by Russian separatists, posts on her blog “fake news from the Kremlin and praises the Russian government”.

In an interview with the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravdaa year after the events, she accused the Ukrainian forces of having “hidden” behind the civilians who were in the maternity ward, “thereby violating the Geneva Convention for the Protection of the Public during Hostilities.”. As for the Associated Press journalists who published her photo and reported her story in Western media, she accused them of “have not kept [de son témoignage] what they needed” and to have wished “the death” of her baby.

A martyr city

Besieged for weeks by Russian forces and pro-Russian separatists, the port city located on the Sea of ​​Azov was shelled by Moscow in the spring of 2022. After hitting the city’s maternity hospital, killing three people, including a child, a theater where hundreds of families had taken refuge was also hit by a strike a few days later.

“This bombing at the Mariupol maternity ward is inhumane, odious, cruel and tragic”declared Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, interviewed on franceinfo. “I am convinced that this could be a war crime and it really needs to be investigated”she added, while Emmanuel Macron condemned“an unworthy act of war”.

At the time, Moscow first justified this bombing, explaining that it was welcoming a battalion of Ukrainian fighters, before denouncing “staged”. To describe the strategy of the Russian army in this martyred city, Jean-Paul Palomeros, former Chief of Staff of the French Air Force and former Supreme Commander of NATO, declared: “It is violence in its purest form to show that everything that attempts to resist must be countered without mercy. (…) At this stage Putin doesn’t care much. He wants to conquer the territory and capture the imagination by showing that there is no other way out than to submit.”