Pulitzer on the Road Podcast Episode 2 Transcript: “Trapped in Mariupol”

Recorded in New York, NY

Mstyslav Chernov: Journalism started for me 10 years ago. Since then, I have been through six wars. I've seen countless tragedies. I cannot count the dead bodies or dead children I've seen. But I stopped believing. I stopped believing in journalism. When we filmed that bombing of maternity hospital and the Ukrainian policeman Vladimir came to me and said, “Well, this is going to change everything, this is going to stop the war.” And I said, “Look, of course, we'll film, we'll do everything possible to send it. This is not going to change anything.” And honestly, things got worse. Things got worse. And I don't know what to do with that. Honestly, I don't know what to do with that.

Nicole Carroll: Mstyslav Chernov is searching for hope. He is on stage under the soaring rotunda of Columbia University's Low Library receiving the DuPont Columbia award for his documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol. Mstyslav and two colleagues from the Associated Press were the last international journalists in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol during Russia's invasion in February of 2022. This was a full scale ramping up of the war that had been going on since 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. In the cavernous marble room, the faintest noise echoes, but as Mstyslav spoke, those in the room fell perfectly silent.

For 20 days they filmed, they wrote, they witnessed. They followed paramedics searching for survivors crushed in their own homes, then ran for cover as explosions rocked around them. They interviewed victims at the maternity hospital right after it was bombed, and watched a dying pregnant woman rushed through rubble on a stretcher. They risked their own lives to venture out in open spaces with their equipment, searching for a satellite connection to share their work with the world. The coverage during and after this period by Mstyslav and his AP colleagues, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko in Ukraine, and Lori Hinnant in Paris, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the organization's highest honor. This Pulitzer winning work led to the 20 Days documentary produced by the Associated Press and PBS Frontline. The same week we talked to Mstyslav, his film was nominated for an Oscar. Mstyslav sat down to talk with Pulitzer Board member and Boston Globe editor, Nancy Barnes, about the work, the aftermath, and that search for hope.

Nancy Barnes: I've been wondering, how does it feel, on the one hand to have your work so recognized, and on the other hand, to have it recognized for such a moment of horror in the world.

Mstyslav Chernov: I wish this film did not exist. I wish we never had to report on these horrors. But it happened. So now I have to make sure for this story to remain in history, and for Mariupol not to be just a name on the map or just a word.

Nicole Carroll: Welcome to Pulitzer on the Road, bringing you closer to Pulitzer winning work through discussions between Pulitzer judges and winners. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll, a Pulitzer board member and Professor of Practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each spring the board meets in Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University in New York to choose the winners. The discussion is rich and insightful. This podcast is designed to bring a similarly thought-provoking experience to you. In this podcast, the Pulitzer's Nancy Barnes talks with Mstyslav and two of his editors from the AP world headquarters in lower Manhattan. And she'll interview a Ukrainian couple who also survived Russia's violent push into Mariupol.

Nancy Barnes: Last night, you talked about how sometimes it’s hard to have hope. And I would agree with you that it feels like the world is on fire, and it seems like it gets hotter every day. And I wonder how you have the endurance to get up and talk about this over and over again.

Mstyslav Chernov: First of all, it is a misconception that the camera protects you from trauma or from the impact of tragedy, because you actually keep experiencing it again and again, as you watch, as you talk to people about their tragedies. I remember every single drop of blood, every tear. As journalists, we made a choice, a conscious choice to do what we do. But for most of the people who are suffering, who are losing their families, their homes, they don't know why this is happening. And I think that's the most traumatizing part of the war. People of Mariupol, when they watched the film, they told me that they are finding hope in it, and I couldn't really understand how they, how exactly they find hope, and where it is. But then they explained to me that no one is ever alone. No one is left behind. No one. There is always someone to support people in need, people who are suffering, whether it's a neighbor, or a doctor, or firefighter, a journalist sometimes. And that support to the community around gives people power and energy and strength to go forward. So when we left Mariupol I thought that after everything we lived through, after our lives were saved by people we didn't know, so many times, how could I stop?

Nancy Barnes: Why did you feel like you had to go to Mariupol knowing what a tough assignment it was going to be?

Mstyslav Chernov: When there were indications that Russia might attack next day or a day after, just looking at the map, you could understand that Mariupol will get surrounded, and besieged. And we went there, we drove all night. And we arrived right before the bombs started to fall. And I remember we were trying to kind of cheer ourselves up and joke, but it was -- they were bitter jokes, like we are going to a city which will probably be a city where the Third World War starts. So okay, let's brace, let's brace for this impact. We just didn't know it was going to happen so quick. We didn't know we were going to be the only journalists remaining there. And therefore our names will become well known, and Russia would claim that we are information terrorists. Because when there are a lot of journalists around there is certain anonymity, and it's easier to work. Not our case.

Nicole Carroll: With an attack eminent, the journalists and their editors decided they would report from Mariupol. They loaded into a white Volkswagen van, stopped for spare tires and groceries, then made it to Mariupol at 3:30 in the morning on February 24. An hour later, the first bombs hit the outskirts of the city. They headed to Mariupol's left bank, the neighborhoods closest to Russia. Homes were destroyed or on fire. There were a few bomb shelters, so they joined families taking cover in an apartment basement. A little girl in a dark blue coat with silver flowers was crying. Mstyslav asked her, “Why are you upset?” She says, “I don't want to die. I wish it would all end soon. I woke up from bombings today. And I realized the war started.”

Nancy Barnes: We talk about bearing witness as journalists, a lot. But I think most of us have never had to bear witness in the way that you have had to bear witness.

Mstyslav Chernov: It is a burden, but it's much better to be broken than indifferent.

Nancy Barnes: If not for your team, I think, nobody would have known what happened there. It seems like that’s one reason why the residents sort of embraced and adopted you, because they also recognized that without your team, that was a story that would not be told.

Mstyslav Chernov: I think a lot of them knew that this might not change much, but still there was at least this feeling that someone hears them. And that helps to go forward. I think that’s the feelin that everyone in this world deserves, that they have rights to be heard. There still is a lot of distrust – it’s kind of trendy to not trust journalists anymore, and I think that is coming from the fact that many countries, totalitarian, authoritarian, including some of the democratic countries, started to see information as a weapon. And by extension, they started to see journalists as soldiers. Soldiers are targeted. Soldiers are for the countries that are at war, are legitimate targets. That’s not how it should be. But that’s what these governments are trying to convince their people sometimes, so that also passes on to a wider population. They stop seeing you as someone who tells the story, and they start seeing you as someone who has an agenda, or is a soldier. I find that quite dangerous.

Nicole Carroll: One of the most haunting images out of Mariupol came March 9th after airstrikes decimated a maternity hospital. In the photo that ran in newspapers around the world, a pregnant woman lay dazed and bleeding on a stretcher, her hands supporting her pregnant belly, medics rushing her through the rubble. Her baby was dying inside her, and she knew it. Doctors told the journalists she screamed, “Kill me now,” as they tried to save her life. The baby was born dead, the team reported. A half an hour later, the mother died too. They later learned her name was Irina. A Ukrainian police officer on the scene, Vladimir, asked if he could make a statement. Mstyslav filmed it.

“Russian troops commit war crimes. Our family, our women, our children need help. Our people need help from international society. Please help Mariupol.”

Russian officials said the reporting was false, and the wounded women were actors.

Nancy Barnes: How did you think about that, when you're seeing people dying, and you're tracking down the woman who was basically being carried pregnant on a stretcher across the field in a war zone, and hearing all of this babble about it being, you know, a made-up scene for propaganda purposes.

Mstyslav Chernov: I cannot say that I felt surprised. That's for sure. Because we saw that before. And actually, that is a very good indicator of how important the story is. You can't fight with propaganda, because then you are doomed to be on their level, or to just to be out of resources. What you can do, though, is to follow up and give more context and be sure that more is published.

Nicole Carroll: That footage made the journalists a target. The Russians were looking for them. But they continued to film and report. They didn't just risk their lives to record the assault, they exposed themselves to transmit it.

Russians had cut internet and phone service. So the journalists had to come out in the open to send their images through a satellite phone link. “I would sit down,” Mstyslav said, “make myself small and try to catch the connection.” On March 15th, a dozen soldiers burst into the hospital where they were staying, yelling, “Where are the journalists?” They had blue armbands. They were Ukrainian soldiers with orders to get them out. The journalists crammed into a Hyundai with a family of three, part of a Red Cross convoy, among the 30,000 people that made it out of Mariupol that day through a safe corridor known as the Green Zone. In their Pulitzer winning story, Mstyslav said, “People were nervous, they were fighting, screaming at each other. Every minute there was an airplane or an air strike, the ground shook. We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. At each, the mother sitting in the front of our car would pray furiously, loud enough for us to hear.”

Nancy Barnes: The description that you guys give of the escape out of Mariupol -- every time I read or hear that, my blood pressure goes up. I just try to imagine what it might have been like to be in in that situation. How did you keep your cool through all of that?

Mstyslav Chernov: Yeah, we didn't. That's the answer. It was really nerve wracking, but at the same time, there is a certain system. Again, this is not the first war I've been through, and this is not the first time I'm trying to salvage some important footage or go through checkpoints. We had been through that before. So there are ways to do it right. But of course, you never know if things can go wrong. Look at what happened to Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian filmmaker that was at the same time with us in Mariupol. Now we know he wasn't sending any footage out of the city, but he was filming. And he was trying to leave the same way we did, just later than we did, and he got executed on the Russian checkpoint. So that was a very clear perspective on what happens to you if you get caught. So we did instruct the family to tell that, if we were caught, to people at the checkpoint, to say they didn't know us, they didn't know who we were. And we just jumped in their car. And so if we got arrested at least, they would get to carry out all the materials, all the hard drives and cards we had. This was the second day of the green corridor, and thousands of cars were leaving. And it was very, very chaotic and the system of thorough checks on the Russian checkpoints were not established yet. There were no lists. And there were no devices to scan telephones. We had a car and it was heavily damaged by shrapnel. So all the windows were scotch taped and the doors wouldn't open and all that really helped to distract attention from us. But now that I think about it, it's of course, there is a lot of luck in that because we've been able to get the cameras out, the cards out, everything

Nancy Barnes: Do you fear being killed on the job?

Mstyslav Chernov: I do. Yeah, who wouldn't?

Nancy Barnes: What goes through your head?

Mstyslav Chernov: Look, when you wake up in a hospital surrounded by patients who have lost their limbs, who are heavily injured, and you wake up to sounds of bombs that are falling near the hospital -- you really don't want to get out of that basement. You're afraid, because that's the feeling that you have all the time, that feeling that every single minute your life can end. There is no way to get rid of that feeling. And I can tell you, that's a very very hard thing to function with. When every single minute you feel that you can die right now. And it's not in your control. So properly functioning with that is hard. But then you see a nurse who just gets out to a hospital yard under the bombs, and gets the snow melts it in a bucket and wipes floors with it, with this water, and then you see doctors who are tearing sheets and dressing wounds with that, and give their foods to patients or to pregnant women who are hiding in the hospital. Then you see firefighters who are trying to extinguish fire without water, or ambulances -- you can't call an ambulance in Mariupol. So if you're injured, you're dead, because there's just no connection to call the hospital, to call an ambulance. But if you're driving around the city, you're in constant danger of being hit by a drone or by a bomb. Paramedics were just driving around looking for injured and then police took an impossible task to try to stop looting, to put some kind of an order to the panic in society, and again, another impossible task and when you see all that, then what? You can't just sit it out. You go because you're part of that community. And you're a journalist, and you are there because you made this choice to be there. You get up and you do what you do.

Nancy Barnes: How different is it to be doing that work in your own country, versus covering a war zone in someone else's country?

Mstyslav Chernov: All human lives are equally important. All humans deserve equall, that their stories are told, the stories of their pain and their struggle are told. So that being said, emotionally, of course, you are much more impacted by the effect that this war has on your own community. That’s just how, I guess, our hearts work. You can't stop thinking that these bombs are not just destroying a city, they are destroying your own memories. They are destroying parts of your childhood. And, yeah, that's much more painful. So it takes a lot of effort to still keep yourself a step away from those emotions and to keep your reporting as unbiased as possible. And that's where working for an international agency like AP really helps, because there is always support from editors, like, “Mstyslav, you have to get a second opinion on that.”

Nancy Barnes: God bless editors.

Nicole Carroll: At this point, we're joined by two of those editors from the Associated Press overseeing coverage of Ukraine: Derl McCrudden, head of global news production, and Paul Haven, head of global news gathering. Derl is based in London, and would often be the one who talked to Mstyslav. Paul is in charge of all international reporting, with an emphasis on journalist safety. He says they'd much rather miss a story than put anyone at undue risk.

Paul Haven: And that was true in Mariupol, too, and that's been true in Gaza, and throughout the Ukraine war. But it is a dangerous business, and there's no way to do it without some risk. So I think our goal is to minimize the risk as much as possible. And that does not guarantee that nothing is going to happen.

Derl McCrudden: I would say our job overall is to bear witness. And we have to take risks in order to do that. And as Paul is saying, our job is also to mitigate that risk. But it is unrealistic to think that you can eliminate it. And so when we go, we have to calculate people's skills, the knowledge, we have people on the ground, the knowledge we have of a changing situation. And when Ukraine happened, it wasn't like we dusted off a plan that is just the same for every single high-risk area, we had to create something unique to the challenges we were facing.

Nancy Barnes: So just back to Mariupol for a minute. So how they ended up being the last three journalists standing there. They got there early because they had the instincts that this was going to be a strategic battle ground, right. Were there other journalists who got out sooner? How is it they ended up being the last three?

Derl McCrudden: So there were other teams there, but then they left. And they pulled out and got safe passage out. The team decided to stay.

Nancy Barnes: Okay.

Paul Haven: But I think it's fair to say that we thought there would be another opportunity. You know, when they made that decision, we didn't think it would be 20 days.

Derl McCrudden: And what we did about it was we had to then pivot our approach. You can't tell a team to turn left or turn right, because they're having to make those real time decisions themselves. And so there's a reality check about what we could do. We could help and advise, we could counsel. But the other thing that we had to do was work really hard to figure out what were the routes out, at a time when Russia was agreeing to open safe passage, safe corridors, and then reneging on them, with cars coming under fire. So cars were leaving Mariupol and then having to turn back because the road was deadly. And eventually, they came out in a Red Cross convoy because we were able to tell them when it was leaving.

Paul Haven: I've been a journalist for about 30 years. I can't -- it's very hard to think of another example of a story of this magnitude, that one team of journalists was the difference between the world knowing about it, or it being forever sort of shrouded in darkness.

Nancy Barnes: They have these incredibly powerful images. How difficult was it for you to get those images out into the world?

Derl McCrudden: The comms were interesting because they had a satellite phone, but hey didn't always want to turn it on in case it was going to illuminate their position. We would have a rhythm of communication where teams check in and where they can pass information backwards and forwards, which was then informing the rest of our text report, so our written stories that go out to the world. When they were in another hospital, they had to climb seven floors. There were tanks around them. There was tank fire into the buildings they were witnessing. Mariupol was ablaze and they were having to go up to a very exposed seventh floor of the hospital to try and catch the signal, which occasionally would be there and occasionally wouldn't. He phoned me, my son was crying in the bath, at the time a one-year-old, and Mstyslav phoned up. And he heard the crying child in the background. I said, “Mstyslav, are you okay?” And he said, “I think I'm calling you at a bad time.” And then he described this scene of Mariupol ablaze. He said, “I'm just looking at these apartment buildings ablaze.” It still makes the hair in the back of my head tingle. 

Nicole Carroll: Tyhran Khosrovian and Olena Holeha were dentists living in Mariupol at this same time. The couple had just moved in together to an apartment overlooking the Sea of Azov. When the bombing started, they evacuated to a family home. Now, they are safe in Poland, but talked about how little information those living in Mariupol had – and how critical it was.

Tyhran Khosrovian: It was difficult to see, but we saw how those people who lived in the nine-story building would go outside to cook, and shelling would start. We’d just run inside our house because our home was a single-story house with a fence, but others would get totally plastered to the ground, entire families wiped out. Then you go outside, and walk around your neighborhood while it’s more or less quiet, and you look around this territory, and it is covered with corpses.

Olena Holeha: In reality, the scariest thing was seeing the planes. Everyone was afraid of those. We knew - I heard it right then - that those planes were dropping aerobombs. When I heard that, my heart just went to my toes. I thought it was the end when I heard those planes, and I thought, that’s it, a bomb is about to drop on us. I really thought I did not exist anymore in this world.

Nicole Carroll: With no reliable news, family members would venture out of the home to see if a convoy was leaving to the humanitarian green zone. At one point, Tyhran's dad said, If I don't come back, I'm dead. They had no idea what was happening around the city. Now, the couple says, they are grateful to the journalists who stayed and told Mariupol's story to the world.

Tyhran Khosrovian: Otherwise, it would have been yet another town that had existed and got occupied, and then God knows what happened to it. Nobody would have known anything else otherwise.

Nancy Barnes: When we're at the Pulitzer Board, we're always looking for work that has impact and changes lives. And it seems to me that what I'm hearing is, well, we didn't obviously stop a war. But we did affect lives for the better in many small ways that might add up to some big ways, especially with regards to the Green Zone being opened.

Mstyslav Chernov: We know for a fact now that that the green corridor was negotiated because of the images we were able to send out of Mariupol. So politicians and NGOs, they had an instrument to negotiate the green corridor. We got hundreds of messages from people who recognize their relatives in the photos or in the videos that they saw. And these people were searching for their relatives for days and weeks. And they've been asking, “Where exactly was that filmed?” So these small, small things – well, they're huge things if you think about them. Every Ukrainian photographer, dreams about making a photo or a video that will stop the war. But no one succeeded so far.

Nancy Barnes: You've clearly been on a mission to make sure that this is a story that is told, and not forgotten and that the context is remembered. When you look back on your 20 days, is there an image, a particular image or two that you've taken that gives you hope?

Mstyslav Chernov: I don't feel like this is a mission. I don't feel like we as journalists have to do be on a mission. As soon as we are on a mission, we become activists and trust to an activist is much less than trust to a journalist.

Nancy Barnes: Maybe I should say compelled.

Mstyslav Chernov: I can say I just owe this to the people of Mariupol. I owe this to the children who died there. I owe this to families who, despite being in danger, kept helping us. That was a very important moment, when we just found out that Irina, and her child died, the one on a stretcher being carried out, and we just found out she died. And we were so sad about that. And we saw another pregnant woman from that hospital being brought to a surgery room, and they made a cesarean. But they were not maternity hospital doctors, they were just doctors of the emergency hospital. So they didn't really know, exactly, if what they do was going to be successful, and she was injured and the child was in danger. And the whole room was silent when the child came out, and she didn't cry. And there was so much tension and fear in that room, and then suddenly, the child started crying and there were tears on everyone's faces, and there was so much joy. And one of the doctors told me, “I am so tired of people dying in this room. I only saw people dying in this room. And finally there was the human who was born.” And then two minutes after bombs started hitting nearby and everybody was hiding in the corridors and nurses were carrying this newborn child with their bodies. And that was heartbreaking. But yeah, that's the moment which I remember, always.

Nicole Carroll: The Pulitzer winning work from the Associated Press went beyond those first 20 days. An AP investigation found evidence that as many as 600 people died in the March 16 airstrike on a Mariupol theater, double the number of originally thought to be killed. Another investigation revealed Russia's effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian. Russia claimed these children didn't have parents or guardians, or that they couldn't be reached. But the AP reported that officials deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, told them they weren't wanted by their parents and used them for propaganda. Still, other work showed how eight months after the initial assault, Russia was scrubbing all evidence of Ukraine from Mariupol.

Nancy Barnes: Some of the AP coverage documents that Russia is changing street names, knocking down buildings, sometimes kidnapping people into Russia as part of the Russian Federation. Is it your perspective that they're trying to wipe out the Ukrainian identity of the entire country?

Mstyslav Chernov: We can see the system in these actions. Anyone who feels Ukrainian poses a threat for Russia because they're going to resist. Mariupol is an illustration of that. Because Russia makes a lot of effort to transform it into Russian city, wipe out anything that's left Ukrainian, including people with Ukrainian passports. And they just make their lives impossible. You cannot get proper medical attention, or work, or send your kid to school. People are forced into having a different identity. Books in schools are replaced, the history is being completely changed. Buildings are being knocked down, therefore evidences to war crimes is being erased. Mariupol had around 400,000 to 500,000 people before the full scale invasion, and after the invasion, it is about 80,000. But there are more and more Russians who are replacing Ukrainians, who are taking their homes, who are just buying themselves a nice place by the Azov Sea, and not understanding that they are walking on the bones, on someone's bones.

Nancy Barnes: Do you ultimately hope to be just to be a documentarian? Last question.

Mstyslav Chernov: You want me to be honest with you?

Nancy Barnes: Yes.

Mstyslav Chernov: I want one day to be able to put away the camera and never pick it up again, after everything that happened, but I just don't feel that this is the right time to do it.

Nancy Barnes: And then what would you do without a camera?

Mstyslav Chernov: I don't know. Just live my own life and be with my daughters. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to resist the temptation to come back. But that's how I feel now.

Nicole Carroll: So let's go back to that award speech at the cavernous Low Library at Columbia, the one in front of a packed room of fellow journalists who are now absolutely still. The one where Mstyslav describes searching for hope, and how he found it while reporting on the streets of Mariupol.

Mstyslav Chernov: So people ran towards us across the street that was bombed by Russian bombs, and they saw press sign on my helmet and they grabbed me and they said, “Does Ukraine still exist as a country?” “Can you film me so my relatives can find me?” “Can you please tell the world what is happening?” And in a few days that there was no information in Mariupol, because it was cut off, the society collapsed completely. I've never seen anything like that. The modern society cut off from the information, the modern society cut off from all the journalism, all the connection, just collapses. There I found an understanding and a hope in journalism again, because it’s really needed for the people to be connected. Sometimes it’s more important than food and water, the information. I cannot stop the bullet with my camera, I cannot stop catastrophic bleeding with my lens. I cannot stop Russian bombs falling and killing a child, but at least I'll keep trying. And we all will keep trying. And I thank you for not giving up. Thank you for that.

Nicole Carroll: So what makes a work worthy of a Pulitzer Prize? In describing the selection of AP’s work, the jury cited the team's brave, compelling journalism under horrific conditions. “This speaks to the mission of reporting in dangerous times.” The judges were particularly impressed with “the extraordinary excellence across mediums that the team was able to produce, offering an innovative template for modern war coverage, while maintaining the courage and moral compassion that informed the greatest coverage of conflicts throughout the ages.”

Thank you for joining Pulitzer on the Road. We're honored to bring more attention to Pulitzer-winning work and the creators behind it. This series is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It is supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation. All episodes are edited for length and clarity. In future episodes, we'll hear from authors Barbara Kingsolver and Hernan Diaz. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends to listen in. To see this work, and the work of all the 2023 winners, please go to pulitzer.org. Pulitzer on the Road is produced by Central Sound at Arizona PBS. Our producers are Anna Williams and Alex Kosiorek with Arizona PBS, and me. Audio engineering by Robert Anderson, Alex Kosiorek, and Joe Miller. Editing, promotion, and other support by Edward Kliment, Pamela Casey, and Sean Murphy. Fact checking by Jessica Quesada. Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller is our executive producer. I've been your guide, Nicole Carroll.

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