We were the only international journalists left in Mariupol. We have been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting from the hospital when armed men appeared in the corridors. The surgeons gave us white coats for a disguise. Suddenly, at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in. "Where are the journalists, damn it," the soldiers asked. I looked at their armbands (blue armbands - Ukrainian) and tried to calculate the probability that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward, giving myself away.
"We're here to get you out," they said. The walls of the operating theater shook from artillery and machine-gun fire. It seemed we were safer inside. However, the Ukrainian soldiers had an order to withdraw us. We ran out into the street, leaving the doctors who sheltered us, pregnant women who were under fire, and people who were sleeping in the corridors of the hospital because they had nowhere else to go. I felt terrible leaving them all.
It was nine minutes, maybe ten, an eternity on roads past bombed-out houses. When shells exploded nearby, we fell to the ground. Shock waves shook my chest one after another, and my hands went cold. We got to the entrance, and the armored cars took us to a dark basement. Only there did we learn from a policeman friend why the Ukrainians, risking the lives of their soldiers, took us out of the hospital. "If you are caught, you will be filmed and forced to say that everything you filmed is a lie," he said. "All your efforts and everything you did in Mariupol will be in vain." The policeman who had recently begged us to show the world his dying city was now begging us to leave.
We went to the thousands of cars that were preparing to leave Mariupol. It was March 15th. We had no idea if we would make it out alive.
I grew up in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city 30 kilometers from the Russian border, and I learned how to handle weapons in school. It seemed pointless. Ukraine is surrounded by friends - I thought. Since then, I have covered the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nogorno-Karabakh. However, when the Americans, and then the Europeans, evacuated their embassies from Kyiv this winter, I studied maps showing the build-up of Russian troops near my hometown. My only thought was: "My poor country."
In the early days of the war, the Russians bombed the huge Svoboda Square in Kharkov, where I hung out in my youth. I knew that Russian forces would view Mariupol as a strategic point due to its location on the Sea of Azov. So, on the evening of February 23, I went there with my longtime colleague, (Names are removed for safety reasons), an Associated Press Ukrainian photographer. We went in his white Volkswagen van. On the way, we got worried about spare tires and found on the Internet a person who lived nearby and agreed to sell us tires in the middle of the night. We explained to him and the cashier at the convenient store that we were preparing for war. They looked at us like we were crazy. We arrived in Mariupol at 3:30 in the morning. An hour later, the war began.
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