20 Days in Mariupol: “Nightmare You Cannot Wake Up From”

HARI SREENIVASAN, HOST: Mstyslav Chernov, Thanks so much for joining us. Your film 20 Days in Mariupol documents what happens when the Russians invaded? First for people who might not know, why is Mariupol so significant?

MSTYSLAV CHERNOV, DIRECTOR, “20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL”: Well, starting from 2014, Russia has tried to occupy Mariupol in the very beginning of Russia’s invasion to Ukraine. It is a port city, a huge port city with a huge industrial…  it was, unfortunately, because it now is destroyed, with a huge industrial infrastructure. And tactically it’s important because it is directly on the way from Russia to occupied Crimea. So, from the point of logistics, from a symbolic point of view, this is probably one of the most important cities in Ukraine for Russia to try to occupy.

SREENIVASAN: You were there in the very beginning. We’re talking back in February of 2022, and you capture a lot of the anxiety of the people there. Describe what they were going through knowing that this is an important city that Russia will want, and they’re coming.

CHERNOV: I think in the beginning, there was a lot of hope, and among us as journalists too, there was a lot of hope that even if there will be a siege, it will be not so destructive. So it just caught us all by surprise that Russians didn’t even try to, to be careful. It was just indiscriminate barrage of, of all kinds of bombs and, and weapons. And as soon as, as soon as the Russian forces understood that they can’t take Mariupol easily, that Ukrainian forces will be fighting for every single inch of their land. Russia just started to destroy every building that was on the way. So as soon as the seige went to its full mode the power lines were cut off. There was no water, food, no food supplies. So therefore, looting has started, and it was just pure chaos. We, it was very hard to operate for the city workers. Imagine a city which is constantly getting bombarded, but doesn’t even have a phone line to call the ambulance. Therefore, if you are injured, you die. It was horrible. And the worst thing, there was no connection between people. So the society just collapsed. And that was deliberate tactics. And we as journalists were, you know, in the middle of all this.

SREENIVASAN: You made an active decision in making and crafting the film to center it around civilians. And there are so many gripping scenes in there. There was a scene where you start following a woman from a maternity hospital. What was that like?

CHERNOV: Yeah, that we were hiding from this airplane that was bombing the area in, in a building which was nearby. And we saw, we saw that the hospital was bombed, bombed. A bit later, after the bomb happened, we went up, up the building and saw the fire in the hospital. So we ran there as fast as we could because we knew it’s a hospital. And the scene that we arrived there was shocking. Most of their people were already evacuated, but there were still a lot of pregnant women and rescue workers. And everything was destroyed. And then I saw rescue workers carrying this woman, her name is Irina, she was 32 years old. She was pregnant, and they were carrying her, and she had this terrible wound on her pelvis. And, and it was current moment. There was like a silence, like deafening silence, like a ring in my ears, like after the bomb explodes right? In the film, we really tried to, to  transfer, to transfer audience there in that moment. And it carried her, he carried her through the rubble. And this, this run towards the, towards the ambulance was so, it seemed so endless, so long, although they had to run across just a yard, the hospital. And then they just they, they loaded her in a, in a ambulance, and they left. And then the day after, we were searching for her, because we didn’t know, we didn’t know which hospital they carried her. We still were, we still hoped that she would survive, but she she didn’t.

SREENIVASAN: The video that you took from that maternity hospital, Ukrainian President, Vladimir’s Zelensky, and leaders in the EU have thought about that and used that footage as possibly evidence of war crimes. And I wonder, have you been contacted by any authorities to import that as evidence in any kind of an international tribunal?

CHERNOV: So there is, there is a problem with war crime trials. First one is that to start, to even start one, you need to de-occupy the city. When Bucha was de-occupied, we saw the horrors that happened there, but the trials were possible exactly because there were bodies, there was physical evidence of, of these crimes. With Mariupol, we know for sure that the scale of the war crimes is maybe 10 times bigger. I can’t even imagine how much bigger the scale of the war crimes in Mariupol is. However, to even start speaking about this, we need to see the city being de-occupied. And the problem here is that longer it stays under occupation, more of the, more of the evidences are being destroyed. So these buildings that still have the remains of people who died in the shellings, they, they just being knocked down and, and turned into dust to pave roads. And bodies are thrown into mass graves with just numbers, with the, well, basically numbers being erased after a while because there’s like, on this wooden, small wooden plaques all, all this, all this is making investigations of war crimes very difficult. However, fortunately, we’ve been able to get most of the footage out the original files, right? So files would exist, files with the, with information in them, and that would make it easier to identify. But yeah, a lot of, a lot of evidence, that was the evidence that were filmed by residents were erased on the checkpoints when, when people were trying to leave. And their phones got just erased. And it’s gone.

SREENIVASAN: You grew up in Kharkiv. What’s it been like to watch images to go to places that you are familiar with that are now bombed out or apart?

CHERNOV: When I came back to Kharkiv after, after Mariupol it was heavily bombarded. And I was just going and trying to film again the victims of this, of these bombardments. And one day I got a, a call from the rescue workers with just an address. So I drove there very quickly not thinking what exactly that, you know, what was that address? And then I arrived. I realized that that’s, that’s a building where I lived for five years when I was a student, and there were several, there were three dead people just in front of a house where I, I used to, you know, spend so much time and it was like coming, it was like coming, it was like, it was like a nightmare you cannot wake up from.

SREENIVASAN: How do you, how do you function, I guess, emotionally, physically, psychologically, when you’re seeing these things, that are kind of unspeakable? I mean, you wrote for the AP that I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in. What does that mean?

CHERNOV: Well, when, when you are at the scene, when, when there is a lot of adrenaline pumping up, when there is a thought that you also need to survive and you need to do everything quickly, and the only fear you have is to be sure that you need to capture every moment of, of what is unfolding in front of you. So you don’t analyze emotionally what is happening when it hits harder is when you are actually editing. And for almost six months, or, well, actually for almost a year, we edited the film. So every single tear, every single drop of blood, I remember very clearly, I just can’t escape from that. And it is just something you have to live with. And I guess all Ukrainians and all international journalists who work now in Ukraine, they all go through similar experiences. And what I’m always trying to say is that whatever the audience sees on the screen in this film is not something exclusive to what we live through. It is something that all journalists now are going through and all the civilians are going through in Ukraine.

SREENIVASAN: There were about a hundred thousand people, as you said, that were able to get out. Yeah. But there were so many still left in Mariupol, and they were struggling. They were desperate. You showed signs of looting, you showed them wondering who was doing the bombing. Why did you wanna show that?

CHERNOV: The story would be incomplete without these reactions, because these reactions are, are, are reactions to, to the information blockade. What is, what is extraordinarily sad about, about the siege of Mariupol? That it was not only a physical military siege of the city was an information siege — an information that led to these consequences. Now we kind of see this it is a good example for a future, well, it’s a terrible example for a future, but it’s something that needs to be researched of, of how the society collapses and how people get confused and lost and susceptive to propaganda when they’re life is in danger and when they have zero access to, to information. And that’s also a note on importance of, of, of journalism in general in, in, for our society.

SREENIVASAN: Your team was likely the last reporting team left in there. And we’ll play a clip. You are essentially surrounded, you’re inside a hospital and there’s Russian tanks with large Zs on them. Explain what’s happening.

CHERNOV: A day after the bombing of Mariupol maternity hospital, we were looking for survivors. And we were hoping that Irina, who we saw on the stretcher survived. And we went back to hospital number two, which is a hospital where we spent a lot of time. And we found, we found out that she died and we found other survivors. One of them gave birth that was like a ray of light in the middle of destruction and horrors. But as soon as we’re trying to leave, we realize that the frontline is moved and the battle is happening outside of, outside of a hospital. Sniper shot a nurse and we cannot get to our car. And the Russian tanks started rolling around the hospital and shooting at the residential buildings. So kind of had a hard choice whether to keep filming, being in danger to be shot at or hide somewhere. We filmed, but we obviously couldn’t send anything from there. There was no connection. Yeah. And we would just went hiding because we knew that if Russians come to the hospital, they will capture us. They will see the cameras, they will capture us, and who knows what they’re gonna do with us. Put us in front of a camera and say that everything was filmed was not true, or he would just shoot us because. Well, now I know that at the same time with us in Mariupol, Mantas Kvedaravicius who’s a Lithuanian filmmaker, was filming as well. He wasn’t sending anything, but he was in Mariupol. And while attempting to leave Mariupol several days after we did, he was captured and executed. So we know, like we knew that we shouldn’t get captured, and doctors dressed us in overalls so we could pretend to be doctors in case Russians came in. But we were saved. It was a miracle. It was a miracle that we got out from that hospital. It was a miracle. So.

SREENIVASAN: This is just a snapshot of what happened in a particular city in just a particular set of weeks. And here we are still in the headlines. There are regular attacks that are happening. There is an active shooting war. Did you think that this would last this long?

CHERNOV: I hoped it wouldn’t, but for me, it lasts already for nine years. It doesn’t last for a year. It lasts for nine years. So, and all I’ve seen so far is escalation of this invasion. Russia invaded Crimea, it annexed it, then it invaded Donbass and it was fighting. But then it was a peace treaty when Russia and Russia kind of swallowed that part, occupied that part of the territory. Now they are advancing and they’re hoping for another peace treaty, which will allow them to occupy even more territories. And then I know for sure that if that’s the case, they will prepare. In a few years, there will be another attempt and there will be just endless. So as much as I want this to be over any minute right now, I realize that until, until, and I get this from speaking to Ukrainians until most of the Ukrainian recognized territories recognized by the UN are liberated there will be no peace. And there will be always danger of escalation of the invasion.

SREENIVASAN: The film is called “20 Days in Mariupol” Director Mstyslav Chernov, thanks so much for joining us.

CHERNOV: Thank you. Stay safe.