AP journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka arrived in Mariupol before dawn on Feb. 24. By the time they left nearly three weeks later, the once-thriving seaport lay in ruins. This is their story.
A second child died, then a third. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets.
The Port City superstore was being looted, and we headed that way through artillery and machine gunfire. Dozens of people ran and pushed shopping carts loaded with electronics, food, clothes. For several days, the only link we had to the outside world was through a satellite phone. And the only spot where that phone worked was out in the open, right next to a shell crater. I would sit down, make myself small and try to catch the connection.Every single day, there would be a rumor that the Ukrainian army was going to come to break through the siege. But no one came.By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave.
“This will change the course of the war,” he said. He took us to a power source and an internet connection. By this time, no Ukrainian radio or TV signal was working in Mariupol. The only radio you could catch broadcast twisted Russian lies — that Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shooting at buildings, developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some people we talked to believed it despite the evidence of their own eyes.
Hours passed in darkness, as we listened to the explosions outside. That’s when the soldiers came to get us, shouting in Ukrainian.
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