Late one night in early April, Ukrainian military medic Mariana Mamonova was travelling towards a combat position in Mariupol, south-east Ukraine, with soldiers from her unit.
Her battalion was stationed at the Illich steel plant - one of the city's last Ukrainian holdouts. But the Russians were closing in, and travelling any distance from base meant risking death or capture. The facility, notorious for its squalid conditions, abusive staff and chronically overcrowded rooms, was the site of a. Both sides blame the attack on each other.
"It depended on which guard was on shift though," she said. "Sometimes I could spend half a day outside, other times they didn't let me out at all." Her husband Vasyl, frustrated at a perceived lack of urgency from the Ukrainian government in negotiating her release, appealed for her to be freed on humanitarian grounds.he told the BBC just days before her releaseMariana was transferred to a maternity ward in Donetsk where she was treated well, but the threat of being separated from her baby remained.
But over the weekend, something changed. Mariana doesn't know why but all of a sudden the swap was given the green light.The following Tuesday, she was transferred with dozens of other prisoners to a city in Russia near the Ukrainian border. There, she was blindfolded, her hands tied, and put on a military plane with other prisoners to a location in Belarus.