Thread by @fulelo

Excerpts from the article by Mstyslav Chernov and @EMaloletka, witnessing the last three weeks in Mariupol under siege:
apnews.com/article/russia…
"The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in." (Cont.)

'I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said."
"We ran into the street, abandoning the doctors who had sheltered us, the pregnant

women who had been shelled and the people who slept in the hallways because they had nowhere else to go. I felt terrible leaving them all behind."
Time was measured from one shell to the next, our bodies tense and breath held. Shockwave after shockwave jolted my chest"

"few people believed a war was coming, and by the time most realized their mistake, it was too late."
"One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell phone, radio and television towers"

"Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us, there would be nothing. That’s why we took such risks"

"The deaths came fast. On Feb 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel. She died.A second child died, then a 3rd. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal,they couldn’t navigate bombed-out streets

"Sometimes we would run out to film a burning house and then run back amid the explosions.

There was still one place in the city to get a steady connection, outside a looted grocery store. Once a day, we drove there and crouched beneath the stairs to upload photos and video"

"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.

A shell exploded on the roof of the store, throwing me to the ground outside."

"I tensed, awaiting a second hit, and cursed myself a hundred times because my camera wasn’t on to record it.

We raced back to the hospital. Within 20 minutes, the injured came in, some of them scooped into shopping carts."

"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. I had seen so much death

"that I was filming almost without taking it in.
I saw the fireball just a heartbeat before pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face.We watched smoke rise from a maternity hospital. When we arrived, emergency workers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women from the ruins"

"In our isolation, we knew nothing about a growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit our work. The Russian Embassy in London put out two tweets calling the AP photos fake and claiming a pregnant woman was an actress. The Russian ambassador held up copies of the

photos at a U.N. Security Council meeting and repeated lies about the attack on the maternity hospital.
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.
We went up to the 7th floor to send the video from the tenuous Internet link. From there, I watched as tank after tank rolled up alongside the hospital compound,

each marked with the letter Z that had become the Russian emblem for the war.

We were surrounded: Dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients, and us.
the path to our van, with our food, water and equipment, was covered by a Russian sniper who had already struck a medic."

"Around 30,000 people made it out of Mariupol that day — People were nervous. They were fighting, screaming at each other. Every minute there was an airplane or airstrike. The ground shook.
We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. As we drove through them — the third, the tenth,

the 15th, all manned with soldiers with heavy weapons — my hopes that Mariupol was going to survive were fading. I understood that just to reach the city, the Ukrainian army would have to break through so much ground. And it wasn’t going to happen."