They were the last international journalists in the besieged city of Mariupol and here AP’s Mstyslav Chernov gives his account of his time there with colleague Evgeniy Maloletka before they escaped the city on March 15.
The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.
We had been documenting the siege of the Ukrainian city by Russian troops for more than two weeks and were the only international journalists left in the city. 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?”
I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.
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The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.
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. I felt terrible leaving them all behind.
Nine minutes, maybe 10, an eternity through roads and bombed-out apartment buildings. As shells crashed nearby, we dropped to the ground. Time was measured from one shell to the next, our bodies tense and breath held. Shockwave after shockwave jolted my chest, and my hands went cold.
We reached an entryway, and armoured cars whisked us to a darkened basement. Only then did we learn from a policeman we knew why the Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to extract us from the hospital.
“If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say 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 had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol.
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It was March 15. We had no idea if we would make it out alive.
As a teenager growing up in Ukraine in the city of Kharkiv, just 20 miles from the Russian border, I learned how to handle a gun as part of the school curriculum. It seemed pointless. Ukraine, I reasoned, was surrounded by friends.
In the first few days of the war, the Russians bombed the enormous Freedom Square in Kharkiv, where I had hung out until my 20s.
I knew Russian forces would see the eastern port city of Mariupol as a strategic prize because of its location on the Sea of Azov. So on the evening of February 23, I headed there with my long-time colleague Evgeniy Maloletka, a Ukrainian photographer, in his white Volkswagen van.
We pulled into Mariupol at 3.30am. The war started an hour later.
About a quarter of Mariupol’s 430,000 residents left in those first days, while they still could. But few people believed a war was coming, and by the time most realised their mistake, it was too late.
One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the mobile phone, radio and television towers. The few other journalists in the city got out before the last connections were gone and a full blockade settled in.
The deaths came fast. On February 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel. She died.
A second child died, then a third. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets.
The doctors pleaded with us to film families bringing in their own dead and wounded, and let us use their dwindling generator power for our cameras. No-one knows what’s going on in our city, they said.
Shelling hit the hospital and the houses around.
After March 3, for several days, the only link we had to the outside world was through a satellite phone.
By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in.
On March 9, twin air strikes shredded the plastic taped over our van’s windows. I saw the fireball just a heartbeat before pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face.
On March 11, I watched as tank after tank rolled up alongside the hospital compound, each marked with the letter Z that had become the Russian emblem for the war.
We were surrounded: Dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients, and us.
The Ukrainian soldiers who had been protecting the hospital had vanished. And the path to our van, with our food, water and equipment, was covered by a Russian sniper who had already struck a medic venturing outside.
Hours passed in darkness, as we listened to the explosions outside. That’s when the soldiers came to get us, shouting in Ukrainian.
It didn’t feel like a rescue. It felt like we were just being moved from one danger to another. By this time, nowhere in Mariupol was safe, and there was no relief. You could die at any moment.
I felt amazingly grateful to the soldiers, but also numb. And ashamed that I was leaving.
We crammed into a Hyundai with a family of three and pulled into a five-kilometre-long traffic jam out of the city. Around 30,000 people made it out of Mariupol that day - so many that Russian soldiers had no time to look closely into cars with windows covered with flapping bits of plastic.
People were nervous. They were fighting, screaming at each other. Every minute there was an airplane or air strike. The ground shook.
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.
As we pulled up to the 16th 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.
We are still flooded by messages from people wanting to learn the fate of loved ones we photographed and filmed. They write to us desperately and intimately, as though we are not strangers, as though we can help them.
When a Russian air strike hit a theatre where hundreds of people had taken shelter late last week, I could pinpoint exactly where we should go to learn about survivors, to hear first hand what it was like to be trapped for endless hours beneath piles of rubble. I know that building and the destroyed homes around it. I know people who are trapped underneath it.
And on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had bombed an art school with about 400 people in it in Mariupol.
But we can no longer get there.
