Weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and sought to “liberate” the port of Mariupol by bombing it into the ground, the words of the video journalist Mstyslav Chernov of the Associated Press are a powerful reminder of why journalism matters.
After 20 days of documenting the city’s agony, Chernov wrote: “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 realized their mistake, it was too late.
“One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell 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 absence of information in a blockade accomplishes two goals. Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on and they panic. At first, I couldn’t understand why Mariupol fell apart so quickly. Now I know it was because of the lack of communication.
“Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us, there would be nothing.
“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. I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important.”
During the two decades or so I spent reporting on war, I often wondered how I would feel if armed men barged into my home. Just imagine waking up on a bright spring day to prepare breakfast and get the children ready for school before you head to work. Instead, you find troops at your door: taking over your house, rifling through your cupboards, eating your food. And worse. Then they tell you that your country isn’t yours after all, and that they’re there to liberate you.
In the absence of information, with the phone and the internet cut off, after a while you are no longer sure what to believe. It was not by chance that one of the first acts of Russia’s invasion was to bomb the TV tower in Kyiv. The aim was to cut off information, to silence and sow uncertainty. The AP team were persuaded to leave Mariupol when it became clear that if captured, they would be forced to claim on camera that their work was a lie — even though their images showed clearly that an invading army had deliberately caused the death of civilians: from children and pregnant mothers to those old enough to have survived the famine inflicted by another leader in the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin.
By 1933, several million Ukrainians had died of starvation in one of the most fertile regions on earth. News of it was silenced by Soviet bureaucrats. Today, journalists in Russia have also been ordered not to mention the war, but to call it Putin’s “special military operation”. The difference now is that every major news organisation has journalists reporting from Ukraine so that the reality of the war unleashed by President Putin is being documented.
When our colleagues come home there will be a sharp disconnect. Days and months when their minds and hearts are still in Ukraine. Moments when seeing their own child will bring back thoughts of another child crying outside a housing block gutted by shells, a home turned into a nightmare doll’s house in a world turned upside down.
We know that what they witness may haunt them for many years to come. Most of all: the people they couldn’t help. The children they couldn’t save. The mothers they couldn’t comfort. And they will also grieve for the friends and colleagues who have lost their lives.
In Moscow, state media are creating an alternative reality in which Putin talks of patriots and traitors. Ukraine is reported to be bombing its own maternity hospitals and kindergartens.
That’s why the journalists risking their lives to bring us eye-witness accounts from Ukraine know that words and images matter in this war on European soil in the 21st century. That language matters. That truth matters.
Thanks to the work of those reporting from Ukraine, we cannot simply look away and tell ourselves it’s a faraway place of which we know little. We cannot say that we didn’t know, and we cannot say that we didn’t see.
