It was in Kharkiv – barely 30 km from the Russian border – that video journalist Mstylav Chernov grew up. When in his adolescence, an initiation to the handling of guns was offered to him, he found it useless, so much the war seemed to him backward-looking value and that around him, he only saw friendly countries.
From the first days of the Russian offensive, last February, the huge Place de la Liberté where the young people met, where Mstylav had his childhood memories, was bombed. The palace of the regional administration is blown up. Mstylav has already left. The war has started, and the journalist knows that Mariupol is a strategic issue, he alerts his Ukrainian colleague, Evgeniy Maloletka, who also works with the AP agency. They arrive in the port city at night, the first bombs strike an hour later.
Mariupol. 430,000 inhabitants. In a few days a quarter of the population hit the road. Those who think they will not be affected by this war realize their errors of judgment too late. Two Russian bombs cut off water, electricity, cell phone towers, radio and television, and deprive the encircled town of food supplies. The other journalists present in Mariupol have just enough time to exfiltrate before the connections are cut.
And no more information gets through. The Russians can act with impunity, no one will know. “For this reason, Mstylav repeats, we took great risks to show the world what we were witnessing…/…We saw children die under the bombs, families decimated by the shells”, the doctors who beg them to film everything, understanding that the journalists by showing the world these horrors will perhaps influence the course of things. Photos and videos, Mstylav and Evgeniy send them in precarious conditions each time, from the top of the sixth floor of the gutted hospital. Yes, it passes, but for how long.
It passes, and that’s why the Russians are looking for them all over the city. The command told them that two reporters were filming everything, they had to be found. The two journalists hide as best they can.
After 20 days in conditions that need not be described, it is Ukrainian soldiers who will enable the two reporters to leave Mariupol. Their lives are in danger, but not only their lives, the Ukrainians will explain to them. The Russians wanted to capture the two AP journalists to make them say under threat, in front of a camera, that their work was only fake with comedians. That they were Western agents who came to practice disinformation.
After 20 days, they came out in minutes. Barely a look for the doctors and families who hid them and saved their lives. Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka think about it every day. Today, their work is rewarded in journalism prizes in Europe, and last night in Bayeux, at the War Correspondents Prize. It is to the civilians of Mariupol, to the women and children, to the memory of those who died that these distinctions are dedicated.
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The Bayeux Prize website