You're reading: Medical volunteer tweets ‘I’m dying’ after being shot

“I’m dying,” Olesia Zhukovska posted to her Vkontakte page and Twitter on the morning of Feb. 20.

Zhukovska, a 21-year old medical volunteer supporting EuroMaidan, was shot in her neck on the Independence Square when the truce was broken and fighting revived. A horrifying photo of Zhukovska being walked through the square with a stain of blood spreading on her scarf and white medical vest went viral within hours. In her right hand, she holds a mobile phone.

 The post that she managed to send before she lost consciousness got 6,500 likes.

 According to her profile on Maidaners media project, Zhukovska was at the protest since its first days in November. She came to Kyiv from Kremenets in Ternopil Oblast, where she’s studying in a medical school. 

 Some days before the standoff resumed in Kyiv, Zhukovska went back to her hometown. When she saw the protesters clashing with police officers in Kyiv downtown on Feb. 18, she got on the bus and came back to Kyiv on Feb. 19. 

 “We need your support. The carnage started this morning. It can turn worse later in the day,” Zhukovska wrote on her Vkontakte page just 20 minutes before she was shot.

 On her page Zhukovska kept informing her friends about events in Kyiv and was calling for everyone to join protesters. 

Zhukovska was taken to Kyiv’s city hospital No. 17 and then was moved to the Institute of Neurosurgery. Lawmaker Iryna Herashchenko of UDAR party visited her in the hospital.

“She gained consciousness already,” the lawmaker told the Kyiv Post.