Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP/Shutterstock
A video journalist is giving afirst-hand accountof his experience being rescued this week after coming under attack for his reporting from one of the hardest-hit cities inRussia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Associated Press reporter Mstyslav Chernov and his colleague Evgeniy Maloletka were the only international journalists left in the city — and, they say, they found themselves a target of Russia’s efforts to stop mainstream coverage of the conflict.
“The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in,” Chernov wrote in an AP article published Tuesday.
While reporting ata hospitaland dressed in scrubs as camouflage, Chernov recalled a dozen Ukrainian soldiers bursting in, asking, “Where are the journalists, for f—- sake?”
“I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise,” Chernov wrote. “I stepped forward to identify myself. ‘We’re here to get you out,’ they said.”
Chernov added, “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.”
After leaving the hospital, Chernov learned from a police officer why the Ukrainians spirited them away, he wrote.
“If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you filmed is a lie,” the officer told him, he wrote. “All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain.”
The officer then begged Chernov and Maloletka to leave the city.
“It didn’t feel like a rescue. It felt like we were just being moved from one danger to another,” Chernov wrote. “By this time, nowhere in Mariupol was safe, and there was no relief. You could die at any moment.”
According to the AP, the duo had made their way to the port city of Mariupol the night the war started because they believed Russia would view it as “strategic prize” due to its location.
As residents and fellow journalists fled in the initial weeks of the fighting, they decided to stay as “the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell phone, radio and television towers” causing a full blockade, according to Chernov’s account in the AP.
Chernov wrote that lack of information caused panic and chaos: “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,” he wrote. “I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important.”
He and Maloletka continued their reporting despite the safety and communication challenges.
“There was still one place in the city to get a steady connection, outside a looted grocery store on Budivel’nykiv Avenue,” he wrote Tuesday. “Once a day, we drove there and crouched beneath the stairs to upload photos and video to the world.”
In one near-miss, Chernov remembered how he was thrown to the ground at a store. “I tensed, awaiting a second hit, and cursed myself a hundred times because my camera wasn’t on to record it. And there it was, another shell hitting the apartment building next to me with a terrible whoosh,” he wrote. “I shrank behind a corner for cover.”
He also chronicled so much death that he was “filming almost without taking it in.”
Chernov wrote that they “knew nothing about a growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit our work.”
Indeed, the Russian Embassy in London has posted tweets calling the AP’s photos fake and claiming a pregnant woman in one of the images was actually an actress. The Russian ambassador also held up copies of the photos at a U.N. Security Council meeting and tried to denounce them, he said.
Chernov wrote that the Russian public relations efforts appeared to be working on some in the Ukraine.
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Russia’sattack on Ukrainecontinues after their forces launched a large-scale invasion on Feb. 24 — the first major land conflict in Europe in decades.
With NATO forces massing in the region around Ukraine, various countries have also pledged aid or military support to the resistance. Ukrainian PresidentVolodymyr Zelenskyycalled for peace talks — so far unsuccessful — while urging his country to fight back.
Putin insists Ukraine has historic ties to Russia and he is acting in the best security interests of his country. Zelenskyy vowed not to bend.
“Nobody is going to break us, we’re strong, we’re Ukrainians,“he told the European Unionin a speech in the early days of the fighting, adding, “Life will win over death. And light will win over darkness.”
source: people.com
