They were the eyes of the planet in the besieged city of Mariupol. They told of the lives swallowed up by barbarism. They showed agony, fear, devastation. From the pen of Mstyslav Chernov and through the lens of Evgeniy Maloletka of The Associated Press (AP), distress had faces and injustice was carried by words. But these last journalists who covered the blockade of Mariupol left the port city, besieged by the Russian army.
How will we know what’s going on there now? Without their work, the planet would not have been shaken by the image of this pregnant woman, evacuated on stretchers after the maternity hospital where she was was bombed (she later died). Without their presence in this city cut off from the world, we would not have seen these dead children in the arms of their parents, these buildings on fire, these mass graves dug in haste.
In a poignant account of their evacuation from Mariupol and their work of more than two weeks in this martyred city, journalist and videographer Mstyslav Chernov, who grew up in Kharkiv, recalls that the cutting of communication channels in a blockade – like the one of Mariupol — pursues two sinister objectives.
“Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on and they’re panicking,” he wrote in a text published by the AP. “Impunity is the second objective. In the absence of information from a city, images of demolished buildings and dying children, Russian forces can do whatever they want. »
Bomb after bomb, the journalist continues, the Russians have cut the supply of electricity, water and food in the city, strategically located between Crimea – a peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 – and the separatist territory of Donetsk – occupied since 2014 by forces supported militarily and financially by Russia. Then they cut the communication networks.
“I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important,” says Mstyslav Chernov. “That’s why we took such risks to tell the world what we were seeing, and that’s what made Russia so angry that they hunted us down. »
Gone to save their jobs
While the two journalists were inside a hospital in Mariupol, a dozen armed men burst into the facility on March 15, shouting: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake ? » Russians or Ukrainians? In the uncertainty, doctors have slipped white coats on the shoulders of journalists so that they blend in with them. “We are here to evacuate you”, told them the soldiers who were in front of them. The Ukrainians, who had previously asked them to stay in Mariupol to document Russian barbarism, were now telling them to leave.
“We had no idea if we were going to make it out alive,” writes Mstyslav Chernov, recalling the frantic race that ensued through the bombed-out streets of Mariupol. “When shells fell nearby, we flattened ourselves on the ground. Time was measured by the interval between each shell, our bodies tense and our breath caught. »
A policeman explained to the journalists, during their flight, the reason for their sudden evacuation: “If [les Russes] catch you, they’ll put you in front of a camera and they’ll tell you that everything you filmed was a lie. All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will have been in vain. »
A work that had been carried out at the risk of their lives to try to save others. “I saw so many deaths that I filmed them almost without realizing it,” says Mstyslav Chernov in this breathtaking account.
freezing hell
The death toll from the siege of Mariupol is difficult to assess, but the dead would number in the thousands. On Wednesday, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, indicated that nearly 100,000 people would still be there “in inhumane conditions”, trapped in the ruins of this city “in a state of total siege, without food, without water, without drugs, under constant bombardment”.
Interviewed by the AP upon her arrival in Poland, Viktoria Totsen, a 39-year-old resident of Mariupol, said that Russia had been bombarding the city relentlessly for about 20 days. “For the past five days, planes have been flying over our heads every five seconds and dropping bombs everywhere: on apartment buildings, daycares, art schools—everywhere. »
Residents who fled Mariupol described to the NGO Human Rights Watch “a freezing hell, with streets strewn with corpses and the rubble of destroyed buildings”. For the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Iryna Venediktova, it is no longer a war, but a genocide in Mariupol. “The theaters of war have rules, principles,” she told Agence France-Presse. What we see in Mariupol, [c’est] the total absence of rules. »
On Tuesday evening, President Zelensky denounced the capture by the Russians of a humanitarian convoy loaded with food and medicine heading for Mariupol. “All our attempts, unfortunately, are being frustrated by the Russian occupiers, with bombardments and obvious terror,” he lamented. The Russians reportedly took 11 bus drivers and 4 aid workers prisoner, in addition to seizing the convoy’s cargo.
The Ukrainian leader, however, dismissed out of hand on Monday the offer made by Russia to Ukraine to admit defeat in Mariupol. A capitulation that would allow the country of Vladimir Putin to erect a land corridor between Crimea and Russian territory.
more eyes
Hell is therefore well established in this Russian-speaking city. “To break the blockade, it would be necessary to carry out an offensive. And I do not believe that this is the current strategy of the Ukrainian army, which is rather based on the defense of the big cities”, analyzes Nickolay Kapitonenko, professor at the Institute of international relations of the Taras Shevchenko University of kyiv and consultant to the parliamentary committee on foreign policy of Ukraine.
On Tuesday, the city bordering the Sea of Azov was targeted by two “superpowered bombs”, the municipality said. On Sunday, an art school housing 400 people was bombed. Last week, it was a theater, under which hundreds of people were hiding and in front of which had been written “children” in large letters, which was engulfed by the Russian destruction.
“I could pinpoint exactly where we should have gone to find out if there were any survivors, to listen [les témoignages des gens] who had been caught for hours under the piles of debris,” writes journalist and videographer Mstyslav Chernov with emotion.
But, “we were the last journalists in Mariupol”. And now there are none.
With the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse