Mstyslav Chernov, a video journalist for the AP, has shared his account of the siege of Mariupol, documented with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka. "The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in. We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks," he says. "We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage. Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for f---’s sake?”
Chernov says the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take them out of the hospital. "We ran into the street, abandoning the doctors who had sheltered us, the pregnant women who had been shelled and the people who slept in the hallways because they had nowhere else to go" he says. "I felt terrible leaving them all behind." He says that after they were whisked away through a wave of shelling, a policemen told them why Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to extract them, saying, "If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you filmed is a lie. All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain."
"I felt amazingly grateful to the soldiers, but also numb. And ashamed that I was leaving," Chernov says. He says they "crammed into a Hyundai with a family of three" and pulled into a long traffic jam of battered cars leaving the city last Tuesday. "We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. At each, the mother sitting in the front of our car would pray furiously, loud enough for us to hear," he says. "As we pulled up to the sixteenth checkpoint, we heard voices. Ukrainian voices. I felt an overwhelming relief. The mother in the front of the car burst into tears. We were out. We were the last journalists in Mariupol. Now there are none."
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Chernov says he and Maloletka spent 20 days in the city, documenting the horrific human toll of constant shelling, with hospitals bombed and the dead piled in mass graves. "I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in," he says. Before long, his only connection to the outside world was a satellite phone. He says one reason the Russians bombed cellphone and radio towers was impunity. "With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. ... That's why we took such risks to be able to send the world what we saw, and that’s what made Russia angry enough to hunt us down," he says. "I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important." (Click here for his full harrowing account.)
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