Ukrainian video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, of The Associated Press, was one of just a few who remained inside the besieged city of Mariupol after Russian occupation forces severed all connections to the world outside — and he detailed his attempts to document the atrocities he witnessed firsthand before he too escaped the city.
Chernov, who grew up in Kharkiv, said in a piece for the AP that he knew early on that the Russians would see Mariupol as a strategic target — and so he went there in late February with Ukrainian photographer and Associated Press colleague Evgeniy Maloletka.
On the way, we started worrying about spare tires, and found online a man nearby willing to sell to us in the middle of the night. We explained to him and to a cashier at the all-night grocery store that we were preparing for war. They looked at us like we were crazy.
We pulled into Mariupol at 3:30 a.m. The war started an hour later.
He noted that, in the very early days of Russia’s invasion, nearly one-fourth of the city’s some 430,000 residents chose to flee. By the time it became clear that the Russians were coming for Mariupol, Chernov said, many of the rest were stranded there.
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.
Chernov went on to explain that the blockade of the city served to create a complete blackout of information going in either direction — which he said only contributed to the chaos. People didn’t know what was going on in the outside world, leaving them to imagine that things were as bad or worse everywhere else. And information about what was happening in Mariupol couldn’t get out to anyone who might be ready and willing to provide support.
While most of the journalists who had been in Mariupol fled early on, Chernov said that his team stayed put if only to make sure that those stories were told.
“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 said. “I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important.”
The deaths came fast. On Feb. 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.
Chernov said that despite the near constant shelling, there was one place in the bombed out city where his team could still access the internet and upload photos — and they went there daily to make sure something was making it out to the rest of the world. That signal was gone by March 3.
From that point on, the only connection he had was a satellite phone — and the only place it could get a signal was right next to the crater left by the impact of a Russian shell.
Every day, Chernov said, there would be a new rumor that Ukrainian forces would fight their way into the city — but it never happened.
By the time Russian forces bombed the maternity hospital in Mariupol, their batteries were almost dead. It was a police officer who helped them find a connection in order to get their images and the story out to the rest of the world.
Our batteries were almost out of juice, and we had no connection to send the images. Curfew was minutes away. A police officer overheard us talking about how to get news of the hospital bombing out.
“This will change the course of the war,” he said. He took us to a power source and an internet connection.
Unbeknownst to Chernov, even as he was sending out photos of the maternity hospital, Russian officials were creating a disinformation campaign claiming that the women in the photos were crisis actors and the photos of the bombing were staged.
In addition, all Ukrainian radio and television signals had been cut off in the city. The only radio signal the people could access was repeating Russian propaganda, saying that there was no hope for the surrounded city and that the people should surrender.
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.
Chernov learned that the Russians, apparently angry that photos and stories were still getting out of the city, had a list of names and were actively hunting them. When a dozen Ukrainian soldiers burst into the hospital where they were hiding, wearing scrubs in order to hide their identities, he thought for a moment that they might instead be Russians in disguise.
“Where are the journalists, for f***’s sake?” they asked, and when Chernov stepped forward, they said, “We’re here to get you out.”
Chernov detailed the 15 Russian checkpoints they had to pass through to get out — and the mother in the front of their car who prayed out loud at each one.
“We were the last journalists in Mariupol,” he said. “Now there are none.”