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FILE - Ukrainian soldiers and emergency employees work outside a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. An Associated Press team of journalists was in Mariupol the day of the airstrike and raced to the scene. Their images prompted a massive Russian misinformation campaign that continues to this day. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
FILE - Mariana Vishegirskaya, an injured pregnant woman walks downstairs in a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. An Associated Press team of journalists was in Mariupol the day of the airstrike and raced to the scene. Their images prompted a massive Russian misinformation campaign that continues to this day. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
FILE - A woman walks outside a maternity hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. An Associated Press team of journalists was in Mariupol the day of the airstrike and raced to the scene. Their images prompted a massive Russian misinformation campaign that continues to this day. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
FILE - Smoke rises after shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. An Associated Press team of journalists was in Mariupol the day of the airstrike and raced to the scene. Their images prompted a massive Russian misinformation campaign that continues to this day. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
Lyudmila Mykhailenko, the Mariupol maternity hospital's acting director, speaks to The Associated Press during an interview in Lviv, western Ukraine on Wednesday, March 23, 2022. Accounts by three doctors, including Mykhailenko, at a Ukrainian maternity hospital hit by an airstrike and an analysis of the crater disprove Russian misinformation about the March 9 attack that killed a pregnant woman and her unborn child. "With just one blow, there was simply nothing, no children's clinic, it was simply blown away," Mykhailenko said. (AP Photo/Renata Brito)
Sergei Chernobrivets, a paramedic, poses for a photo on March 23, 2022, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Chernobrivets, who was on the scene March 9 after the Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital, described the injuries to multiple women. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
FILE - Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. The baby was born dead. Half an hour later, the mother died too. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
FILE - A man carries his child away from a damaged maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. An Associated Press team of journalists was in Mariupol the day of the airstrike and raced to the scene. Their images prompted a massive Russian misinformation campaign that continues to this day. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
FILE - Debris covers the yard of a maternity hospital damaged in a shelling attack in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. Accounts by three doctors at a Ukrainian maternity hospita hit by an airstrike and an analysis of the crater disprove Russian misinformation about the March 9 attack that killed a pregnant woman and her unborn child. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
FILE - Ukrainian soldiers and emergency employees work outside a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. An Associated Press team of journalists was in Mariupol the day of the airstrike and raced to the scene. Their images prompted a massive Russian misinformation campaign that continues to this day. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

A woman is on the verge of giving birth when her leg was hit by a bomb. There is a room with medical waste and it was shattered by a shockwave. A nurse had a concussion.

The Mariupol maternity hospital was destroyed in a Russian airstrike. They wish they could forget the day they fled Mariupol, when Russian soldiers deleted evidence from their phones.

The children's clinic at Hospital No. 3 in the besieged was destroyed by just one blow. One continuous shell crater remains in the courtyard of the hospital complex.

Three doctors and a paramedic spoke with The Associated Press about the March 9 airstrike that happened when communications were all but severed and to counter Russian misinformation. They left the city separately in private cars and are now scattered in other towns around the country and in Poland.

Their testimony, along with AP reporting, AP footage from the scene and interviews with experts who analyzed the size of the shell crater, directly contradict Russian claims that there was no airstrike. Russian officials have tried to convince the public that the atrocities in Mariupol are not real.

Two of the three doctors who passed through the Russian checkpoint on their way out of Mariupol said that their cell phones were searched and that they had deleted photos of the city. It is not clear what happened to the people who were separated out.

I had lists on my phone, I had photos, I had everything, but we were strongly told to destroy all of this, said Mykhailenko, who spoke for two hours with hardly any interruption.

A Russian government-linked account shared an interview with a woman in the maternity hospital. Vishegirskaya emerged unscathed from the hospital airstrike.

The new mother said that the hospital was not hit by an airstrike. She said she heard no airplanes but two shells that hit nearby. Who could be responsible was left vague.

She said fellow survivors from the basement agreed when they talked about it.

They didn't hear it either. They said it was a shell that came from somewhere else. She said in the interview that it did not come from the sky.

It is not clear where or under what conditions the interview was filmed.

A team of Associated Press journalists working in Mariupol documented the sound of the plane before it exploded. Two experts consulted by The Associated Press said that one of the explosions blasted a crater more than two stories deep in the courtyard, which was consistent with an airstrike using a 500-kilogram bomb.

Joseph Bermudez, an imagery analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the size of the hole and the effects of impact on the surrounding buildings left no doubt that it was an airstrike.

At least 37 Russian strikes on medical facilities across Ukraine were recorded by The Associated Press. Every hospital in the city has been hit at least once by shells or airstrikes, the first being four days after fighting began. The Mayor of Mariupol said that 50 people had been killed in Russian strikes on hospitals.

The Mariupol hospital was relatively quiet before the attack.

The tiles and glass around Dr. Frantsusova shattered when she was sorting medical waste in a room in another building. The time was about 1:45 p.m. She ran, but the door slammed shut in her face.

Everyone was on the floor when she ran out, she said.

Frantsusova had survived an airstrike before, on a house near hers, and this felt the same, an intense shockwave followed by utter destruction. She and her team of medics got up from the floor to help the injured.

One of the pregnant women was already giving birth when she was brought to us. A woman had an open wound. A third was in a state of shellshock, with injuries to both legs.

The smoke in the distance was filmed by the AP journalists. It took them 25 minutes to arrive at the scene.

It was chaotic by then. Paramedics raced up the stairs to bring down people who couldn't walk on their own. Children and expectant fathers walked out of the door to a scene of blackened trees, smoldering earth and a crater big enough to swallow a truck.

She was hugging a blanket around her shoulders. When an AP journalist with a camera asked how she was, she answered "Fine" and went to the hospital to get her belongings. She said in the interview that she did not want to be filmed.

The injuries to the women were described by Sergei Chernobrivets, a paramedic who was on the scene. He confirmed the extensive damage to the hospital compound, even though he wasn't in a position to determine the source of the explosions.

One of the maternity ward's physicians said a nurse had a concussion and another medical worker was shellshocked. She said that there was no point in staying behind and trying to get medical supplies because it was all destroyed.

Several women were transferred to another hospital, including a woman with a fractured pelvis who died along with her unborn child. The girl was born the next day.

The Russian misinformation campaign was in full swing. The country's embassy in the United Kingdom claimed that the AP photos of Vishegirskaya and another woman wounded on a stretcher were fake.

Russia blames Ukrainian shelling for attacks on hospitals, including the one on the maternity ward in Mariupol, although their story has changed over time.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Monday that the Russian tactic of twisting the truth about war crimes is a deliberate tactic.

They launched a campaign of fakes to hide their guilt of mass killing of civilians in Mariupol.

The hospital was hit again on March 17 and at least four or five patients were killed. The bodies were buried on the hospital grounds.

She and her family packed up what they had left and put it in the car because it was hard for her to run from shelling.

Her phone was wiped at the first checkpoint. At the second, their belongings were searched and their sole knife was seized. A car blew up the previous day and they decided to go through it. They made it to safety in Poland more than two weeks later.

On March 24th, Kucheruk drove out and headed for western Ukraine. Her cell phone was searched at one of the Russian checkpoints.

The city of Mariupol is without a fully functioning hospital because most of its doctors have fled. They have lost their lives and careers and can only hope that one day they will return to their destroyed city.

Everything in your life became a pile of ruins in one instant.

There is a

Susie Blann and Vasilisa Stepanenko contributed.

There is a

Follow the AP's coverage of the war.

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