The photos of the Associated Press journalists showed the world the truth from Mariupol, Ukraine

Ukrinform publishes unofficial translation of Associated Press journalist’s article «20 days in Mariupol: The team that documented city’s agony»

Mstislav Chernov – video journalist of the Associated Press. This is his evidence of the siege of Mariupol. The photos were taken by photojournalist Yevhen Maloletka. The story was recorded by Lori Hinnant, an AP correspondent.

The Russians persecuted us. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were getting closer.

We were the only foreign journalists in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and we documented the siege of the city by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were filming in the hospital when the military with machine guns appeared in the corridors. Surgeons advised us to wear white gowns to avoid standing out.

Suddenly, at dawn, a dozen soldiers came: “Where the hell are the journalists?"

I looked at their armbands – the blue ones of the Ukrainians – and tried to calculate the chances that they could be Russians. I stepped forward. “We’re here to get you out of here," they said.

The walls of the surgical room shook with artillery fire, and it seemed safer to sit inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers obeyed the order to get us out of here.

“If they catch you, they’ll make you tell the camera that everything you filmed is a lie," he said. “All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain."

The officer who once begged us to show the world his dying city now begged us to leave. He directed us to thousands of mutilated cars that were preparing to leave Mariupol.

I became acquainted with weapons as a teenager in the school curriculum.

I grew up in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, just 32 kilometers from the Russian border. These lessons seemed meaningless to me, because Ukraine is surrounded by friends, I thought.

Since then, I have covered the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, trying to show them first hand to the world. But when the Americans and then the Europeans evacuated their embassy staff from Kyiv this winter, and when I saw on the maps the build-up of Russian troops in front of my hometown, I thought, “My poor country."

In the first days of the war, the Russians bombed a huge Freedom Square in Kharkiv, where I walked as a teenager.

I knew that Russian troops would consider the eastern port city of Mariupol as a strategic goal because of its location near the Sea of Azov. So on the evening of February 23, I went there in my white Volkswagen van with my longtime colleague, Ukrainian photographer working for the Associated Press, Yevhen Maloletka.

Along the way, we began to worry about spare tires and found on the Internet a man who agreed to sell them to us in the middle of the night. We explained to him and the cashier at the 24-hour grocery store that we were preparing for war. They looked at us like crazy.

We arrived in Mariupol at 3:30 am, an hour later the war began.

Approximately a quarter of the 430,000 residents of Mariupol left the city in the first days, while they still could. However, few people believed that the war would break out, and when most realized it, it was too late.

Shell after shell, the Russian military shut down electricity, water, food and, finally, turned off mobile phones, radio and television. Several other journalists left the city before the last connection was cut off and a complete blockade was imposed.

The lack of information during the blockade serves two purposes.

The first is chaotic. People don’t know what’s going on and panic. At first I couldn’t understand why Mariupol fell so fast. Now I know it’s because of a lack of communication.

The second goal is impunity. Knowing that no information would be received from the city, that pictures of destroyed homes and dying children would not be published, Russian troops could do whatever they wanted. Were it not for us, there would be no evidence.

That’s why we took such a risk. We wanted to share with the world what we saw. And this is what angered the Russians so much that they started hunting for us.

I have never felt before in my life how important it is to break the silence.

Death came quickly. On February 27, we saw a doctor trying to save a little girl injured by shrapnel. She died.

Subsequently, the second child died, then the third. Ambulances stopped and picked up the wounded on the road, because people could not call for help without mobile communications, and ambulances could not make their way through the bombed-out streets.

Doctors begged us to film families bringing their dead and wounded relatives, and allowed us to use our generator so we could recharge our cameras. “Nobody knows what’s going on in our city," they said.

The hospital and surrounding houses came under fire. The windows of our minibus flew out, a hole broke in the side and the tires punctured. Sometimes we ran out and took pictures of the burning house, and then ran back in the middle of the explosions.

There was a place in Mariupol where you could still use a stable cellular connection – a robbed grocery store on Budivelnykiv Avenue. Every day we went there and, squeezing under the stairs, sent our photos and videos to the world. The stairs would not have saved us, but under them we felt safer than in the open.

The connection disappeared on March 3. We tried to send our video out of the windows on the seventh floor of the hospital. It was from there that we saw the last pieces of the strong city of Mariupol crumble. We saw the Port City supermarket being looted and headed through artillery shelling and machine gun fire. Dozens of people ran and pushed carts filled with electronics, food and clothing.

A shell exploded on the roof of the store, and I was thrown to the ground. I tensed up waiting for the second blow and cursed because my camera was off and not recording.

The second blow came, with a terrible whistle the projectile hit the house next to me. I hid around the corner.

A teenager ran past me, he was carrying electronics in an office chair on wheels, boxes were falling out of him. “The shell fell here, my friends were 10 meters away," he told me. “I have no idea what happened to them."

We ran back to the hospital. The next 20 minutes the wounded came, some of them being brought in carts from the supermarket.

For several days, our only connection to the outside world was via satellite phone. He worked only on the street, near the funnel on the ground, where the projectile hit. I sat down, squirmed, and tried to catch the signal.

Everyone asked when the war would end. I did not know the answer. There were rumors every day that the Ukrainian army would come to break through the siege. But no one came.

During this time I saw deaths in the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies in mass graves. I saw so much death that I no longer took it to heart.

On March 9, double air strikes tore the plastic that covered the windows of our van. I saw a fireball a second before the pain pierced my ear, skin, face.

We saw smoke rising over the maternity hospital. When we arrived, rescuers were still pulling bloody pregnant women out of the rubble.

Our batteries almost ran out, there was no connection to send photos. The curfew began in a minute. The policeman overheard our conversation about how to give news from the bombed maternity hospital.

“It will change the course of the war," he said. He took us to a place where there was communication and where we could charge our cameras.

I was wrong.

In the dark, we sent the images, dividing them into three parts to speed up the process. It took several hours. The curfew was long over, the shelling continued, but the policemen who accompanied us waited patiently.

Then our connection with the world outside Mariupol was cut off again.

We returned to the empty basement of the hotel, where there was a huge aquarium with dead fish. We knew nothing about the spread of Russian disinformation at the time in order to discredit our work.

The Russian Embassy in London published two tweets in which she called the photo AP fakes and the pregnant woman depicted in them an actress. The Russian ambassador showed these photos at a meeting of the UN Security Council and repeated the lie about the attack on the maternity hospital.

Meanwhile, in Mariupol, people asked us about the latest news from the war. Too many people have asked me to remove them so that relatives outside the city can make sure they are alive.

There was no Ukrainian radio or TV channel in the city. The only radio available was telling Russian lies – that Ukrainians were bombing Mariupol, holding its inhabitants hostage, and developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some of the people we spoke to believed in it despite seeing it with their own eyes. The message was constantly repeated, in the Soviet style: Mariupol is surrounded, lay down your arms.

On March 11, the editor called us and asked to find the women who survived the shelling of the maternity hospital to prove their existence. Then I realized that the report turned out to be very powerful if it provoked such a reaction from the Russian government.

We found them in the hospital on the front line, some were with babies, others were just giving birth. We also learned that one woman lost a child and then died herself.

We went up to the seventh floor to send a video, the internet connection was very weak. From a height, I saw a column of tanks with the letter Z, which became the Russian emblem of war, pass by the maternity hospital.

We were surrounded by dozens of doctors and hundreds of patients.

Ukrainian soldiers defending the hospital have disappeared. And the way to our minibus with food, water and equipment was blocked by a Russian sniper who had already shot at a doctor who was going outside.

Explosions were heard in the street, hours passed in the dark inside. After that, soldiers came after us, they shouted at us in Ukrainian.

It didn’t feel like salvation. It seemed that we were just being thrown from one danger to another. To date, there has been no safe place in Mariupol, and there has been no relief. He could have died at any moment.

I was extremely grateful to the soldiers, but I was kind of scared. I was ashamed to run away.

We squeezed into a Hyundai with a family of three, and on the way out of town we came across a 5-kilometer traffic jam. About 30,000 people left Mariupol that day – fortunately, Russian soldiers did not have time to look at plastic cars instead of windows.

People were nervous, fighting, arguing. Every minute a plane flew by or an air strike was heard. The earth shook.

We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. And on each of them, the mother, who was sitting in the front seat of our car, prayed aloud.

As we passed the third, tenth, and fifteenth checkpoints, each with many Russian soldiers and heavy weapons, my hopes that Mariupol would survive were dashed. I understood how many obstacles the Ukrainian army would have to overcome just to get to the city. And this could not happen.

In the evening we approached the bridge, which was destroyed by the Ukrainians to stop the Russian offensive. A column of the Red Cross with about 20 cars is already stuck there. We all turned from the road to the fields and alleys.

The guards at checkpoint 15 spoke Russian with a harsh Caucasian accent. She ordered the headlights of all the cars to be cut out of the convoy so that we could not see the weapons and equipment parked on the roadside. I could barely make out the white letter Z on it.

As we approached the 16th checkpoint, we heard voices. Ukrainian voices. I was very relieved. The mother in the car burst into tears. We left.
We were the last journalists in Mariupol. They are no longer there.

People who want to know the fate of their loved ones from our videos and photos are still writing to us. They write to us with such despair and love that we are no strangers to them, that we can help them.

We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. And on each of them, the mother, who was sitting in the front seat of our car, prayed aloud.

When the Russians fired on a drama theater at the end of last week, where hundreds of people were hiding, I could tell exactly where to go to find out about the survivors, from whom to hear stories of endless hours under the rubble. I know that building and the ruined houses around it. I know people who are stuck there.

As we passed the third, tenth, and fifteenth checkpoints, each with many Russian soldiers and heavy weapons, my hopes that Mariupol would survive were dashed. I understood how many obstacles the Ukrainian army would have to overcome just to get to the city. And this could not happen.

And on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said that Russia had bombed an art school where about four hundred Mariupol residents were hiding.

But we can no longer get there….