DW honors journalists who documented horrors of Mariupol siege

"From all the things I saw in Mariupol, one image has stuck with me: The dead body of an infant lying on the floor of the basement of a hospital."

This scene, which Mstyslav Chernov described to DW, was where he took his last photo in Mariupol, the day he left the besieged city in mid-March.

"We were filming at a hospital when a doctor came and asked me to follow him to the backyard," Chernov said. "There, I suddenly saw dozens of bodies, lying on the ground in bags or wrapped in carpets." The bodies, Chernov said, belonged to civilians killed in shellings. The doctor then took him to the basement, where more bodies were lying. "Among them, there was this small package. The doctor leaned forward and unwrapped it, then I saw it was the small body of a baby. Next to the body was a piece of paper that said it was 23 days old."

Chernov is a staff video journalist for The Associated Press news agency. He and his longtime colleague, freelance photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, have received the DW Freedom of Speech Award for their reporting in Mariupol in February and March.

They arrived at the seaport a few hours before Russian troops entered Ukraine and reported from there for three weeks before they were evacuated from the city in mid-March.

With horrifying detail, their photos and videos narrate how Mariupol, once a prosperous city, was plunged into decimation and chaos under heavy bombardment by Russian forces. The journalists documented the desperate condition in which the residents lived, cut off from gas and electricity, lacking food and drinking water for weeks. They recorded images of mass graves filled with the bodies of civilians and children.

Had it not been for the bulk of evidence Chernov and Maloletka gathered, the world might not have immediately found out about what the Russian invasion was doing in Mariupol.

Photos that defy Kremlin propaganda

On March 9, Maloletka took a picture of medics carrying a wounded pregnant woman out of a maternity hospital wrecked by a Russian airstrike. Chernov also filmed the scene. The pregnant woman and her baby subsequently died, while the photo shot across the web — little did the journalists know at the time that the images would make headlines and prompt official reactions.

"We didn't have the chance, nor easy access to the internet, to monitor media and see the reactions to whatever we filmed or photographed," Chernov said.

"However, when the air strike on the maternity hospital happened, I realized that this was going to be one of the most crucial moments and images of this war and will make a huge impact."

While they had been trying to file those photographs using a weak, unsteady internet signal reachable only in a few spots of the city, Russian media were bombarding the public with claims that their troops were not harming civilians. But Maloletka's viral photos of the destruction of the hospital emerged as irrefutable evidence against the Kremlin's account.

Journalists under fire

Neither Chernov nor Maloletka is a stranger to crisis areas. Chernov has reported from war zones in places like Syria, Iraq and Myanmar; while Maloletka has spent years covering Ukraine's Maidan revolution and conflicts in the Donbas region and Crimea.

But for them, Mariupol was different.

"It was probably one of the hardest and the most dangerous assignments I have ever had," Chernov said. "This war is extremely dangerous and unpredictable, with extremely sophisticated weapons," he explained.

"So as you are worried for your life, you also feel this pressure to produce material and send it out because it is important."

This is what every journalist that is reporting from Ukraine experiences, he emphasized.

Since the beginning of the war, Russian troops have repeatedly fired upon journalists, a tally published by Reporters Without Borders shows. As of June 13, 2022, at least 12 journalists are confirmed to have been killed in Ukraine's battle zones, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Ukrainian officials have reported higher numbers. Some other journalists have been reported missing, abducted or killed under unknown circumstances.

On April 2, about two weeks after Chernov and Maloletka left Mariupol, Russian soldiers shot Lithuanian documentary filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravicius dead there.

Returning to frontlines

Despite all the threats, Chernov and Maloletka are planning to return to the frontlines after a short stay in Germany, where they plan to attend the ceremony for the DW Freedom of Speech Award.

With its award every June, DW honors a media person or initiative which has shown outstanding promotion of freedom of expression and press freedoms.

Chernov described how the situation in eastern Ukraine is not any better than what Mariupol went through under siege, if not worse. "But no one knows the extent of civilian casualties and decimation that's happening there because no pictures are coming out of those areas," he said.

He said he wants to go back to the frontlines because he is Ukrainian and a journalist. Things are happening in Ukraine that people need to know about, he added.

"Browsing through the mainstream media, I get the impression that few people realize how close the war in Ukraine is to Europe and what an immense impact it is going to have on the whole world," he said, adding that the conflict has endless repercussions on the politics and the economy of today's interconnected world.

This is why Chernov sees his work in Ukraine as beyond reporting on a warzone.

"It's more of reporting on the start of something huge, more of witnessing events and battles that will shape the world's future," he said.

"As a journalist, how can you not feel the duty to do that?"