“This will change the course of the war. I was wrong.” Three years ago, Russians attacked a maternity hospital in Mariupol. The tragedy in the lens of Mstislav Chernov
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One of the thousands of war crimes committed by the Russian occupation forces in the Donetsk region was the shelling of a maternity hospital and a children's hospital in Mariupol. On March 9, 2022, the occupiers dropped several bombs there at a time when the city was supposed to have a regime of silence to evacuate people.
Mariupol under attack: Russian crime that shook the world
Then, in March 2022, Mariupol was surrounded for nine days. Due to constant shelling and bombing, the city was without electricity and virtually without communications. People did not have the opportunity to leave the encircled city — the Russian occupiers fired on the coordinated routes of the “green corridors”.
“The maternity hospital in the city center, the hospital, the children's ward and the therapy — all this was destroyed during the Russian air raid on Mariupol. The Russian pilot, who probably does not shy away from calling himself a human, pressed the hook again, knowing exactly where the bomb would aim. The Russians! You have not only crossed the line of unacceptable relations between states and peoples. You have crossed the line of humanity. Stop calling yourself people!” wroteon Facebook, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration Pavlo Kirilenko.
“How long will the world be complicit in ignoring terror?” — Zelensky
In conversation with BBC Deputy Mayor Sergey Orlov said that people could not believe in the reality of shelling. According to him, people in Mariupol who managed to escape from the hospital are “angry” and “can't believe it's all true.” “We do not understand how it is even possible in modern life — to bomb a children's hospital,” Serhiy Orlov told BBC World.
That day, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated shocked that the Russian military bombed the hospital.
“Mariupol. Direct strike of Russian troops on the hospital. People under the rubble. Children under the rubble. This is an atrocity!” he wrote.
Zelensky also once again called on the West to close the skies over Ukraine. “How much more will the world be complicit in ignoring terror? Close the sky immediately! Stop the killings immediately! You have the power. But you seem to be losing your humanity,” he wrote.
Shortly before the airdrop to the hospital, local authorities reported that 1,300 people had already died in Mariupol since the beginning of the Russian invasion. The head of the press service of the city hall, Vitaly Falkovsky, confirmed to the Financial Times that a mass grave had been forced in the city because the morgues were overcrowded and normal funerals were not possible. “Unfortunately, there are just too many bodies,” he said, adding that such a step was necessary.
Among the victims are pregnant women and children
As a result of the terrorist attack on the maternity hospital, three people were killed, one of them a little girl. On March 9, 17 people were reported wounded, including women, doctors and children. Information about the dead Mariupol City Council promulgated the next day, March 10.
For the year of investigation of the case, in 2023, for by data the prosecutor's office of Donetsk region managed to establish a higher number of victims: as a result of the airstrike, at least six people were killed - five adults and a three-year-old girl. At least 33 people were injured in varying degrees of severity. “Due to the fact that we do not have access to the temporarily occupied territory, it is impossible to establish the exact number of victims,” the prosecutor's office explained.
Russian fakes
Russian media called this photo “staged”. They say that women in labor were evacuated from the maternity hospital for a long time, and the fighters of the Azov regiment sat down in the building and set up their firing point there. The blatant lie was spread not only by the media, but also by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian Embassy in the UK. Twitter later removed the embassy post.
In the third year after the tragedy, the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers publishes photos Mstislava Chernova,which documented scary footage, including those included in the documentary “20 Days in Mariupol”.
Along with his Associated Press colleagues Yevgeny Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko, Chernov was among the media who remained in Mariupol during the first weeks of the Russian siege. It was their footage that the world saw first: a bombed maternity hospital, residential neighborhoods shot, the horrors of war in a dying city.
Risking their lives, they transferred materials from the only place where the connection still worked. And on March 15, when there was almost no chance of survival, they were able to get out through the humanitarian corridor.
Based on these frames, Chernov created a film “20 days in Mariupol”— the first winner of the Oscar in the history of Ukrainian cinema“. The film also received a Pulitzer Prize, honors from the British Film Academy and the Directors Guild of America.
“We shot so many dead people and dead children,” - Chernov
After Mstislav Chernov and his team managed to cross 15 enemy checkpoints and get out of the surrounded Mariupol, he wrote a report for Associated Press. In it, he described the horrors he saw with his own eyes, including the aftermath of the air strike on the hospital.
“I have witnessed deaths in the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies dumped in a mass grave. I saw so much death that I filmed it, almost not perceiving it. On March 9, airstrikes shredded the plastic with which we had sealed the windows of our car. I saw the bullet just seconds before the pain pierced my ear, my skin, my face. We watched the smoke from the hospital. When we arrived, rescuers were still pulling bloody pregnant women out of the ruins.” — Chernov wrote.
There was almost no communication, and the batteries of cameras and phones were running low. The policeman, hearing journalists discussing how to transfer the footage, said: “It will change the course of the war.” He led them to a place where there was still a connection.
“We shot so many dead people and dead children. I didn't understand why he thought even more deaths could change anything. I was wrong.”Chernov admitted.
Subsequently, in one of Mstislav's interviews asked: “Is there such footage, maybe not even photos or videos, but something in your memory that you would like to forget?”
He replied: “Unfortunately, I can no longer count how many murdered people I have filmed in my life, and every moment I would like to forget. At the same time, I would like to remember it, because it reminds me what a terrible war is. It reminds me why we work, it reminds me why there is a journalistic profession, a military journalist profession. It is needed to warn people about how cruel and ruthless war is, and how important it is to prevent it. So... I would like to forget all this, but it all had to be filmed.”
Mstislav Chernov is a Ukrainian photographer, Associated Press journalist, filmmaker, war correspondent, president of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers, honorary member of PEN Ukraine and writer. He has covered the Revolution of Dignity, the war in eastern Ukraine, the aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, the Syrian civil war, the battles of Mosul in Iraq, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including the blockade of Mariupol. For this work, he received the Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award, the Giorgi Gongadze Prize, the Knight International Journalism Awards, the Biagio Agnes Award, the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award, the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, and the Free Media Awards. In 2022, he was included in the ratings “People of NV 2022 in the Year of War” and “14 Songs, Photos and Art Objects that Became Symbols of Ukrainian Resistance” by Forbes Ukraine, and video footage from Mariupol became the basis for the film “20 Days in Mariupol,” which in 2024 was awarded an Oscar for the first time in the history of Ukrainian cinema.
Photographer's social networks: Facebook Instagram
We worked on the material:
Researcher of the topic, author of the text: Vira Labych
Editorial director: Olga Kovaleva
Literary editor: Yulia Futey
Website manager: Vladyslav Kukhar
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