by Monica Ricci Sargentini
Associated Press reporter Mstylav Chernov and photographer Evgeniy Maloletka recently documented the bombing of civilians and the horror of the siege of the Ukrainian city. This is the story of how they left town: we would know where to go to tell the bombs at the theater and at school. We can’t anymore
The Russians are chasing us, they have a list of names, including ours, and they were getting closer. We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city and had been documenting the siege by Russian troops for over two weeks. Thus begins the dramatic story of Associated Press journalist Mstylav Chernov, who together with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka was the only one able to document what was happening in the city on the Azov Sea, the gateway to the Black Sea, in the sights of the Russian military since the beginning of the war, because its capture would allow Crimea’s landward reunification with the occupied territories of Donbass. They were the ones who took the photos of pregnant women carried on stretchers from the 9 Show us the mass graves into which the victims of Russian aggression were thrown to remove them from the streets, to provide us with videos and images to show a war that Kremlin propaganda would like to hide.
Two witnesses too uncomfortable to be tolerated. We documented what was happening in the hospital, but some armed men began to patrol the corridors says Chernov . The surgeons gave us white coats so we would go unnoticed. Suddenly, at dawn, a dozen soldiers arrive: “Where are the journalists for the misery?”. I looked at the armbands, blue for Ukraine, trying to figure out the likelihood that they were Russians in disguise. Then I stepped forward. “We’re here to get you out,” they assured them.
A daring escape follows: we ran into the street, leaving behind the doctors who had sheltered us, the pregnant women who had been injured and the people who slept in the aisles because they had nowhere else Chernovs Story . I felt terrible leaving them all behind. Nine minutes, maybe ten, an eternity through bombed streets and apartment blocks. When the bullets hit nearby, we threw ourselves on the ground. Time was measured by the punches, our bodies tensed and our breath held. Shock wave after shock shook my chest and my hands went cold. We reached an entrance and armored cars took us to a dark basement. Only then did we learn from a police officer why the Ukrainians had risked their soldiers’ lives to get us out of the hospital. “If they catch you, they will make you say everything you filmed is a lie,” he explained. “All your efforts and everything you did in Mariupol will be in vain.” The same people who asked us to show the world their dying city were now asking us to leave. It was March 15th. We had no idea if we would survive.
the intuition
Chernov and Maloletka arrive in Mariupol on February 24, an hour before Russia invades Ukraine. They know that the city will be a strategic destination for Putin and decide to go there, even though they fully understand the risks. The attack is immediately brutal, Russian forces bombard mercilessly, people flee and the remaining residents appear close to surrender. At first I could not understand why Mariupol fell so quickly the reporter explains . Now I know it was the lack of communication. Without pictures of destroyed buildings and dying children, Russian forces could do as they pleased. So we took big risks to send what we saw out into the world, and that angered Russia enough to hunt us down. I’ve never felt the importance of breaking the silence.
The first dead
All hell breaks loose and the only journalists on site are Chernov and Maloletka. Electricity, gas and water supplies are cut off in the city. According to the Mariupol authorities, 2,400 people have died so far. On February 27, we saw a doctor trying to save a little girl who was hit by shrapnel continues the journalist who died. another child died, then a third. The ambulances stopped picking up the injured because nobody could call them, because there was no network and it was also dangerous to drive on the bombed streets. The doctors asked us to film the families carrying in the dead and injured and to use their generator for our cameras. “Nobody knows what’s going on in our town,” they told us. The bombings hit the hospital and the surrounding houses. Sometimes we would run out to film a house on fire and then walk back between the explosions. In the city there was one more place for a stable connection, in front of a looted grocery store on Budivel’nykiv Avenue. Once a day we would crouch under the stairs to upload photos and videos and send them out to the world. The stairs wouldn’t protect us much but it felt safer than being outside. The signal disappeared on March 3rd. We tried to send ours out of the seventh floor windows of the hospital. And from there we saw the last scraps of the solid bourgeois city of Mariupol disintegrate. For several days we only had communication with the outside world via a satellite telephone. And the only place the phone worked was outside, right next to a bomb crater. I would sit down, hunker down and try to find the connection. Everyone asked me, please tell us when the war will be over. I had no answer. Every day there were rumors that the Ukrainian army would come to break the siege. But nobody came.
The bombed hospital
By that time I had seen so many dead in the hospital, corpses on the streets, dozens of corpses pushed into a mass grave continues Chernov . On March 9th, two airstrikes destroyed the plastic taped to the windows of our van. I saw the fireball just a moment before the pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face. We saw smoke rising from a maternity hospital. When we arrived, rescuers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women from the ruins. Our batteries were running low and we had no connection to send the pictures. A curfew would be in effect in a few minutes. A police officer overheard us discussing how to spread the word about the hospital bombing. “It will change the course of the war,” he said. He took us to a place where there was electricity and an internet connection. We had already expected so many deaths, including children. I didn’t understand why the cop thought those deaths could change anything. I was wrong. In the dark, we sent the images by lining up three phones, splitting the video file into three parts to make it faster. It went on for hours, well past curfew. The bombing continued, but the police officers assigned to escort us through the city waited patiently. Then our connection to the outside world was cut off once more.
We returned to an empty hotel basement with an aquarium full of dead goldfish. In our isolation, we were unaware of a growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit our work.
The Russian Embassy in London released two tweets calling Ap’s photos fake and claiming a pregnant woman was an actress. The Russian ambassador showed copies of the photos at a meeting of the UN Security Council and repeated the lies about the attack on the maternity hospital.
Meanwhile, in Mariupol, many people asked us for the latest news about the war. They came up to me and said please film me so my family out of town will know I’m alive. By this time there was no longer any Ukrainian radio or television signal in Mariupol. The only radio that could be heard was spreading Russian lies: that the Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shelling buildings and developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some people we spoke to believed it even though the truth was in front of their eyes. Again and again the message was repeated in Soviet style: Mariupol surrounded. Deliver your weapons.
Rescued
Chernov’s report ends like this: On March 15, some 30,000 people left Mariupol, so many that Russian soldiers didn’t have time to look closely at cars with rattling plastic windows. People were nervous. Every minute a plane passed or launched an attack. The earth trembled. We went through 15 Russian checkpoints. To each one the mother who was driving the car we were in prayed angrily, in a voice loud enough to be heard. As we passed them the third, the tenth, the fifteenth, all led by heavily armed soldiers my hope that Mariupol would survive faded. I realized that the Ukrainian army had to go through here to get into the city. And it wouldn’t have happened.
At sunset we came to a bridge that was destroyed by the Ukrainians to stop the Russian advance. A Red Cross convoy with about 20 cars was already stuck there. We turned to the fields and back roads.
The guards at Checkpoint #15 spoke Russian with a harsh Caucasian accent. They ordered the entire convoy to turn off their lights to hide the weapons and equipment parked by the roadside. I could barely see the white Z on the vehicles. As we stopped at the 16th checkpoint, we heard rumours. Ukrainian voices. I felt tremendous relief. The mother who was driving the car burst into tears. We were outside. We were the last reporters in Mariupol. Now there are none.
March 21, 2022 (Change March 21, 2022 | 19:08)
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