With the drama of the residents of Mariupol continuing, the account of Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov, who, along with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, covered for 20 days the siege of Mariupol by Russian forces.
"The Russians were after us. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in. We were the only international journalists left in Mariupol and we had documented its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen started searching the corridors. Surgeons gave us white aprons to wear as camouflage.
Suddenly, at dawn, a dozen soldiers broke out: 'Where are the journalists?'
I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the chances that they were Russian in disguise. However, I stepped forward and introduced myself. "We are here to get you out," they said."
The walls of the operating room were shaking from artillery and machine gun fire, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers had orders to take us with them. We ran down the street, abandoning the doctors who had hidden and helped us, the pregnant women who had been bombed and the people who were sleeping in the corridors because they had nowhere else to go. I felt awful leaving them all behind.
Nine minutes, maybe ten, an eternity passing through streets and bombed-out apartment buildings. A shell falls nearby, we hit the ground. The bombardment continues, our bodies tense and holding our breath. Shock after the shockwave jolted my chest, my hands went cold.
We reached an entrance and armored cars took us to a dark basement. Only then did we learn from a policeman why the Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to get us out of the hospital. "If they catch you, they will put you on camera and make you say that everything you filmed is a lie," he explained. "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 begged us to leave. He led us towards the thousands of cars preparing to leave Mariupol.
It was March 15. We had no idea if we would make it alive."
The bombing of the maternity hospital
"On March 9, two air raids broke the plastic taped over the windows of our van. I saw the flame, a single heartbeat before pain pierced the inside of my ear, my skin, my face.
We saw smoke rising from a maternity ward. When we arrived, emergency workers were still pulling bloody pregnant women from the rubble.
Our batteries were nearly dead and we had no connection to send the images. Curfew was minutes away. A policeman overheard us talking about how to break the news of the bomb to the hospital.
"This will change the course of the war," he said. He took us to a power source and an internet connection. We had pulled up so many dead people and dead children, an endless series. I didn't understand why he thought more deaths would change anything. I was wrong.
In the dark, we sent the images, quoting three cell phones with the video file, split into three parts, to speed up the process. It took hours, well past curfew. The bombing continued, but the officers assigned to escort us into the city waited patiently.
Then our connection to the world outside Mariupol was severed again.
We returned to an empty hotel basement, with an aquarium filled with dead goldfish. In our isolation, we knew nothing of the growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit our work."
Source: in.gr
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