A team of AP journalists arrived in Mariupol in late February 2022. By the time they left nearly three weeks later, the besieged Ukrainian port city lay in ruins. Their work has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
The city of Mariupol came under siege by Russian troops for almost three months in 2022, and turned into a symbol for Ukrainian resistance and now also for Russian occupation. A team of three Associated Press reporters were the last international journalists to leave Mariupol, after almost three weeks of intense shelling.
The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling. There’s 18-month-old Kirill, 16-year-old Iliya, the small girl who was among the first of Mariupol’s children to die in a Russian attack. Each airstrike and shell that relentlessly pounds Mariupol – about one a minute at times in recent days – drives home the curse of a geography that has put the city squarely in the path of Russia’s domination of Ukraine. In the more than two weeks since Russia’s war began, two AP journalists have been the only international media present in Mariupol, chronicling its fall into chaos and despair.A team of Associated Press journalists were documenting the agony of Mariupol from inside the Ukrainian city when they learned their names were on a Russian list. AP video journalist Mstyslav Chernov tells the story of their rescue by Ukrainian soldiers as the Russian forces closed in on a hospital treating the wounded. Chernov and his colleague Evgeniy Maloletka escaped the city on March 15 and passed through 15 checkpoints. And the hospital? It’s been taken over by Russian soldiers.A celebrated Ukrainian medic recorded her time in Mariupol on a data card no bigger than a thumbnail. Associated Press journalists smuggled it out to the world in a tampon. Yuliia Paievska is now in Russian hands, and Mariupol is on the edge of falling. Paievska is known in Ukraine as Taira. She used a body camera to record 256 gigabytes of her team’s frantic efforts over two weeks to bring people back from the brink of death. The footage shows her treating wounded Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainian civilians. The 53-year-old medic last was seen March 21 on Russian television as a captive, handcuffed and with bruises on her face.Amid all the horrors that have unfolded in the war on Ukraine, the Russian airstrike on the theater being used as a bomb shelter in Mariupol on March 16 stands out as the single deadliest known attack against civilians to date. An Associated Press investigation has found evidence that the attack was far deadlier than estimated, killing closer to 600 people. That’s almost double the current estimates. The AP recreated what happened inside the theater on that day from the accounts of 23 survivors, rescuers, and people intimately familiar with the theater’s new life as a bomb shelter. The AP also built a 3D model based on witness accounts, two sets of floor plans of the theater, photos and video taken inside before, during and after that day, and expert comment.Nearly 2 million Ukrainians refugees have been sent to Russia. Their journey starts not with a gun to the head, but with a poisoned choice: Die in Ukraine or live in Russia. Those who choose to live in Russia are then taken through a series of what are known as filtration points, where treatment ranges from interrogation and strip searches to being yanked aside and never seen again. Ukraine portrays these journeys as forced transfers to enemy ground, which is considered a war crime. Russia calls them humanitarian evacuations. An Associated Press investigation found that many refugees are indeed forced to embark on a surreal journey into Russia, subjected along the way to human rights abuses. It also found an underground network of Russians trying to help Ukrainians escape.A series of clandestine, against-the-odds helicopter missions to reach besieged soldiers are being celebrated in Ukraine as one of the riskiest, most heroic feats of military derring-do in the four-month war against Russia. The flights delivered supplies and evacuated wounded during the last-ditch defense of the Azovstal steel mill. It was surrounded by Russian forces in the brutalized city of Mariupol. Ukrainian troops were pinned down for weeks, their supplies running low, their dead and injured stacking up. Ukraine’s president first spoke of the sometimes deadly helicopter resupply missions only after Azovstal’s defenders started surrendering in May. The Associated Press has found and interviewed some of the wounded who were rescued from the death trap.An Associated Press investigation found that Russia’s strategy to take Ukrainian orphans and bring them up as Russian is well underway. It’s one of the war’s most explosive issues. The investigation drew on dozens of interviews with parents, officials and children in Ukraine and Russia. It found that officials deported thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they were not wanted by their parents and gave them Russian families and citizenship. Experts say it is a strategy that can be traced up to senior Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin. They add that raising children of war in another country and culture can be a marker of genocide.Throughout Mariupol, Russian workers are tearing down bombed-out buildings at a rate of at least one a day, hauling away shattered bodies with the debris. Russian soldiers, builders, administrators and doctors are replacing the thousands of Ukrainians who have died or left. Eight months after Mariupol fell into Russian hands, Russia is eradicating all vestiges of Ukraine from it. But it cannot hide the fact that it is building on death: The Associated Press found that more than 10,000 new graves already scar Mariupol. An AP investigation into occupied Mariupol drew on interviews with 30 residents, including 13 living under Russian occupation, satellite imagery, hundreds of videos gathered from inside the city, and Russian documents.
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