Through his eyes, the world has seen Mariupol amidst the war – the dead children, the consequences of the air strike on the maternity hospital, the heroism of doctors, and the suffering of civilians. Photographer and war correspondent Yevhen Maloletka spent 20 days in the besieged Mariupol working on the assignment for the Associated Press.
Together with the AP journalist and videographer Mstyslav Chernov, he came to the city on 24 February 2022, one hour before the start of full-scale Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Yevhen Maloletka, 35 years old. My hometown is Berdyansk, but I have been living in Kyiv since 2004, when I began studying at the university, and I still live here.
Some time earlier, before the war began, we assumed that if it breaks out, then Mariupol would be one of the points that Russians would really want to seize, because it is a strategic city, it is quite big, and it is a road to the Crimea. We always knew that Russians wanted a land corridor to the Crimea, so my friend and I initially worked out an idea: if we are going to cover the war, if it really happens, that was our simple guessing, we looked at the map and chose. He said, “Here is Mariupol. It will be the point”.
Mariupol was full of people. Mariupol was…, well, it was blocked.
There was no opportunity to leave, there was no normal… people did not have water, and they did not have normal access to food there. And all that was under constant shellfire.
We have not seen such a massive use of artillery before; I have never seen it, such an intensive use of artillery, missile artillery, and air strikes. It felt like if they could not come close to the city, they had to burn it down.
Such a medieval, absolutely medieval strategy – to rain the city with shells, to bombard it with whatever, for it to burn, then to destroy the fire station so that it is not possible to put out fires, in order to cause panic among people, to cause fear and misunderstanding of what is happening in general.
A well-known fact is that when all the wounded are transported, of course they are taken to a hospital. So we simply came and met the chief doctor, we asked for a permit, the permission to shoot a video there. We got acquainted with all the doctors there. This was regional hospital no. 2.
Artillery shelling attacks began from the first days, so the wounded were brought there from the first days too. In early days, the hospitals operated…, they were on duty shifts. Some of them on one day and others on another, and so on. They distributed the duty shifts between them; they agreed and coordinated between themselves somehow. But then, there was simply no daily duty. The wounded were taken to where it was closer, also depending on the severity of injuries.
We just watched as observers, we were on stand-by duty in this hospital, and during our staying there, we filmed what was happening in the admission department. People were brought in, including children with injuries, mainly to the legs, head and torso. All sorts of injuries, very bloody, both small and big – some caused by shell fragments up to 300 grams.
In latest days, the operating room worked almost non-stop, without any interruptions for sleep.
The doctors indeed worked in some wartime mode, when even a small injury led to people having their limbs amputated because there was no necessary amount of medicines, no proper sanitary conditions, there was not even an intensive care unit. All the windows in the intensive care unit were broken and it was cold there. That is why everything was in really extreme conditions.
This is hospital no. 3. It was the last day when we were there, and there was simply no space where to put the bodies. The weather was quite cold – they kept people who died just inside the hospital, or people who were brought already dead to them.
We also saw three children (there was another place in the basement there) and a two-month-old baby… Those were just horrible views, horrible pictures, not to mention the fact that people were lying near the entrances to buildings, killed in their flats. Many people committed suicide, jumped out of the windows, hung themselves up. That is in addition to casualties caused by shelling.
There were cases when our help and our video shooting… Well, when we did not need shooting a video there – we were giving some help. Indeed, when we saw that there was a severe patient, or when we realized that we could do something, not just shoot a video, we did help.
For instance, because there were narrow corridors there. There was one woman there… No one could help.
We were not far from “Tysiacha Dribnyts” store (“A Thousand Little Things” store), in one of the houses there… At that time, we had all the batteries discharged, all the batteries in our laptops too, and we planned to go to the hospital. We turned to Troyitska street… or something like that, I don’t remember the name – it was one of those streets. We turned and saw that there were people running away, there was heavy shelling there. We turned around and drove back to the centre. On our way, we called in one of the districts and stopped right near the hospital, which was across the road. We stopped to think about any possible options.
And the building there was quite tall, the city was all in smoke, Azovstal plant was also in smoke, Ilyich steel plant was in smoke too. Everything was in some kind of smog spots and epicentres of explosions.
And there we saw… well, we did not see, but we rather heard it, the sound of an airplane. Then, a series of loud explosions followed. There was a very strong sound wave, a bright orange ball, like from the explosion itself, and all the windows shattered.
Well, it was so really strong… an explosion. Well, how to describe it physically for better understanding? As if the air pressure changed and a sound wave started to blow you away. Well, and then we realized that it was an air strike. We asked one of the tenants living upstairs to let us come in. We saw where the place was, where that shell hit, and then we drove to that place, to the hospital.
It was a maternity hospital. Well, the shell hit the area where the maternity hospital was and where the children’s ward was located. So we happened to be in the centre of that event, and we were documenting it, what was going on there, the consequences, and the progress of evacuation of expecting women.
One picture shows Maryana who gave birth next day, and another young woman, Iryna, who did not survive, unfortunately, and her baby died too. She had a severe… a huge cut from the abdomen to the thigh. I don’t remember exactly, some 50 centimeters, really big. The surgeons did their best, but unfortunately, they could not save the mother, and the child either.
We managed to find some phone signal or Internet signal in order to send our photographs and videos out. I received more than two hundred messages in my social network accounts with requests to help find some relatives, family members or friends, to help identify some people’s location and condition, as there was no telephone signal in the city. There was no electricity, no water and gas, nothing else. Besides, people were staying in the basements, so there was a problem not only with some humanitarian [questions], but also a problem to keep local residents informed in principle, because many people listened to the DPR radio (the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, unrecognized).
They set up their tower and started broadcasting. They proposed to surrender; they urged soldiers to surrender, and promised a humanitarian corridor. But no one knew where it was, what it was about, at all.
Well, they said that local residents should leave, go to a particular location, but people were afraid to go. How to leave? Nobody said how to do it.
We had a car that we lost, and one family agreed to take us out. They had a place in their car, they knew the way, how to get out, and they agreed to take us out.
Apparently, if we had fallen into the hands of the Russian special services, it would not have been anything good for us, because our names were known. We did not hide under any aliases. We indicated our real names, which proves that we are real people. We really worked as journalists for a long period of time.
We were the only team of journalists in the city, which worked at the time, international journalists. Most likely, there were still people who worked there before the blockade, before the complete blockade, but then they left. From the colleagues we saw there, well, they all left.
We were the only ones left there, and we were the only ones who saw everything through the eyes of civilians, the only ones who saw how civilians suffered.
