Twenty days in Mariupol. Twenty days of bombs, difficult if not impossible connections. Twenty days of “hospital deaths, bodies in the streets and dozens of bodies pushed into a mass grave”. The last video journalist left in Mariupol Mstyslav Chernovtogether with the photographer Evgeny Maloletka, he told the Associated Press in a lengthy report of his days in the Ukrainian city besieged by the Russians. From the departure towards the port with a view of the Sea of Azov to the “forced escape from the city.
“The Russians chased us. They had a list of names including ours and they were getting close. We were the only international journalists remaining in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol and had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for over two weeks. We recorded at the hospital when gunmen started patrolling the corridors. The surgeons gave us gods wearing white cloaks to disguise ourselves. Suddenly, at dawn, a dozen soldiers broke in: ‘Where are the reporters, shit?’. Thus begins the story of Chernov, who also explains that he looked at the headbands worn by the military and spoke up despite the hypothesis that they were Russians in disguise. The soldiers were there, in the hospital, where the video journalist and photographer were collecting images “to get them out of there.” The order was clear: get the reporters out of Mariupol.
“Leaving behind doctors who housed us, pregnant women and people sleeping in the hallways,” writes the PA journalist, made him feel horrible. From the hospital, the military and reporters drove “nine minutes, maybe 10,” or at least “an eternity” the trip “through bombed streets and apartment blocks.” Then the arrival “in a dark basement”, where the video journalist and photographer understood why the soldiers had risked their lives to get them from the hospital. “If they catch you (the Russians, ed.), they will put you in front of the camera and tell you that everything you filmed is a lie. All yours efforts and everything you did in Mariupol will be subjects“A policeman explained it to them. The same police officers who, as it turns out later in the report, asked them a few days earlier to tell the world what was going on in Mariupol.
Chernov continued to leave the city March, 15. Before that, together with Maloletka, he spent 20 days in Mariupol and for a long time remained the only international journalist covering the siege of the city.
His journey, he says, began further February 23. A Kharkiv native, Chernov had previously reported on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: “I knew that Russian forces would see the port city of Mariupol as a strategic point for their position on the Sea of Azov, so on the evening of February 23 I am with my colleague Malotelka, a Ukrainian photographer for The Associated Press, drove there in his white Volkswagen van. In the first days after the invasion, which began on February 24, only a quarter of Mariupol’s residents left the city. The others stayed, convinced that “war would not come”. Bomb after bomb, we read in the report, “The Russians turned off the electricityWater, food supplies and finally, above all, mobile phones, radio and television receivers. Without informationwrites Chernov, two goals are achieved: “The first is this chaos“People don’t know what’s going on and are panicking.” The second “is impunity“. “Without information from the city, without pictures of destroyed buildings and dying children, the Russian armed forces could do whatever they wanted.” For that, he says, he and his colleague took the risk to “send the world something we’ve seen,” so much so that the Russians targeted them.
Bodies are buried in a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol, Ukraine, on Wednesday, March 9, 2022, as people are unable to bury their dead due to heavy shelling by Russian forces. (AP Photo / Mstyslav Chernov)
The story then continues with the descriptions of the bombings. One by one the children died. And “the ambulances stopped picking up the injured because people couldn’t call them without a signal” and because it was difficult to move “on the bombed roads”. Sometimes, he says, “we’d run out to film a house on fire and then come back between the explosions.” Connectivity in the city was scarce. “There was only one place, in front of a looted grocery store on Budivel’nykiv Avenue.” But even there the internet signal “disappeared on March 3. Then Chernov and his colleague moved to the seventh floor of the hospital. From there they watched “the last scraps of Mariupol dissolve.”
“For several days, the only connection we had with the outside world was through a satellite phone,” the report continued. At this point he writes again: “I had seen deaths in the hospital, bodies in the streets and dozens of bodies being pushed into a mass grave”.
The video reporter and photographer were also there when the Maternal and Children’s Hospital was hit. “When we arrived, rescuers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women out of the rubble.” They were without batteries and without an internet connection. There they met a police officer who took them to a power source and connected them to the Internet: “This will change the course of the war.” And so it was indeed the attack on the hospital. To send all the files, photos and videos, it “took hours, well beyond the curfew”. “The bombing continued, but the officers assigned to escort us through the city waited patiently.”
Then Chernov and Maloletka They went back to a basement with no connection. Little did they know that their photos outside were now being passed off as fake by Russian news channels. Meanwhile, in Mariupol, “no Ukrainian radio or television signal was working. Only one proRussian radio broadcast a single message “Mariupol is surrounded, surrender your weapons”.
On March 11, three days before leaving town, “the publisher asked us to find the women who survived the attack on the Mother and Children’s Hospital to prove their existence”. That’s how the two found the women they photographed in another hospital, whose pictures went around the world. “We went to the seventh floor to broadcast the video and from there I saw tank after tank approaching the hospital. They had the letter Z, which had become the Russian emblem of the war. We were surrounded, dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients and we.”
Only then, after hours in the dark, did the Ukrainian soldiers come and take them away. “It didn’t seem like a rescue,” writes Chernov, who admits he was “ashamed” that he left. The account of the trip to leave Mariupol is also detailed. The Associated Press two had to go through fifteen Russian checkpoints. With them in the car also a family of three. “At each checkpoint writes Chernov the mother sitting in front of it angrily prayed”. Only then did he realize that the Ukrainian army would not enter Mariupol since they would have to face so many checkpoints equipped with “soldiers and heavy weapons.”
“When we stopped at the 16th checkpoint, we heard rumours. Ukrainian voices. I felt tremendous relief. The mother in front of the car burst into tears. We were outside, says Chernov again. He and Maloletka were the last reporters in Mariupol. “Now there are none.”
He, he concludes, could have told both the air raid on the Mariupol theater, where hundreds of people had taken refuge, and the bombing of the city’s art school. “But now we can’t get there anymore.”
Photo AP Photo / Evgeniy Maloletka