Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's just over two years since Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine, and there's no end yet in sight.

Speaker 16: Ukrainian troops filmed themselves as they withdraw from Avdiivka exhausted after the longest and perhaps the bloodiest battle of the war so far.

Speaker 17: Zelensky said his soldiers had been outgunned 10 to 1, and made an urgent appeal for more weapons from the international community.

Brooke Gladstone: Next week in Russia, polls will be open for a full three days, enabling citizens lots of time to vote in Russian President Vladimir Putin for a fifth six-year term. All of Putin's potential challengers have been eliminated by legal means or extralegal ones, like Putin's best known nemesis Alexei Navalny, who died under extreme duress in an Arctic penal colony on February 16th. His body was laid in the ground on March 1st and two weeks later, Russians are still paying their respects.

Valerie Hopkins: People have been streaming into the graveyard every day while it's open and lining up and waiting to lay flowers.

Brooke Gladstone: Valerie Hopkins is an international correspondent at The New York Times, covering Russia. She says that the mound of flowers on Navalny's grave has grown so large that you can barely make out the wooden cross atop it.

Valerie Hopkins: Some of the places across Russia where people went to lay flowers, they were asked to show their passports and some people were arrested on the spot. Others had law enforcement bodies coming to their homes later. I think it's quite a testament to how beloved Alexei Navalny was, that people are trekking out to a southern suburb to really show their support for someone that the Russian authorities consider to be a terrorist and extremist, and still people are coming.

Brooke Gladstone: More than 400 people have been detained across Russia for publicly paying tribute to Navalny.

Valerie Hopkins: In the same week, one of Russia's best known human rights activists, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced to two and a half years in jail because of his opposition to the war. This is someone who was part of a group of people who won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. He's 70. He was sentenced for the crime of what's called, "repeatedly discrediting the Russian armed forces."

Brooke Gladstone: March 29th will mark one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested while doing his job in Russia.

Valerie Hopkins: Evan is on the cover of this week's time magazine, and I'm so grateful, but I think he just wants to be in Russia reporting about this repression.

Brooke Gladstone: Hopkins says that Russians fear a new mobilization after the election as Russia's Ukrainian quagmire drags painfully on, but as war fatigue and other global conflicts push Ukraine's front line further and further from the media spotlight, a film that palpably conveys the invasions brutality is up for an Oscar. In February of 2022, Mstyslav Chernov, a video journalist for the Associated Press, went to Mariupol, the critical port city on Ukraine's southeastern edge, just 35 miles from the Russian border.

He arrived an hour before the first bombs hit the city would turn off. Chronicled over the next three weeks is captured in the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. He was there as a reporter. Only a fraction of his footage actually made it to the outside world, but when it did, it hit hard.

Speaker 17: AP reporters on the ground showed the world a mass grave in Mariupol.

Speaker 18: I'm talking about narrow trenches in Mariupol with babies bodies in-- AP journalists that have been there.

Speaker 19: Seen so many fakes. Who wins the information war? The one who is the--

Speaker 18: Do you really, truly believe this? Do you truly believe what you're saying?

Brooke Gladstone: At every moment we get to see what he sees, and warning, that's pretty disturbing.

Mstyslav Chernov: We immediately started hearing explosions on the outskirts. There were flashes of light you could see from the window. It was still dark. The battle was largely happening on the outskirts of the city, and military bases and the trenches that were built there for years. For a while it was calm. There was no panic. Some people went to work and it was quite surreal because I had a feeling that something horrible is coming. Judging by just how Russia deals with cities that it tries to attack, how it was with Grozny, how it was with Aleppo.

Brooke Gladstone: Early in the film, you meet a panicked woman crying, "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" To calm her down, you tell her to go into her basement, they won't shell civilian areas and of course they do. Later you see her at a shelter and she reminds you of your not so great advice, and you say, "I'm sorry."

Mstyslav Chernov: I feel like I am telling the story of the community that I'm part of, and sometimes it is hard for me to decide what's best, to keep filming or just to try to help. That's a core thought, which I wanted to come through my narration that I am not a distant narrator. At the same time, I didn't want to impose my emotions on the audience.

Brooke Gladstone: In describing their trauma, you're also describing your own. It's evident in your simple words of description, but behind it, so much weariness.

Mstyslav Chernov: That is something that probably all the Ukrainian journalists feel and all probably all conflict journalists feel.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the most horrendous moments includes the aftermath of a maternity hospital bombing. Incredibly hard to watch. One very pregnant, very injured woman is carried out on a stretcher. We don't know her fate, but then at a second hospital, you find the doctor who treated her. She said that her pelvis had been shattered by the explosion and that the mother and baby died.

Mstyslav Chernov: Her name was Irina. They said she screamed, "Kill me," when they brought her. She knew her child was dead.

Brooke Gladstone: You see nurses getting sniped at, so many dead babies. The kind of thing that a news consumer in America would never see on television. What do you think about American mores when it comes to war of violence?

Mstyslav Chernov: It is crucially important for the war coverage not to be sanitized in any way, because if people see only, let's say, light version of the events, they tend to accept war and it's just unacceptable. We didn't sanitize anything when we were editing.  I remember when Russia shut down MH17 airplane over Donbass nine years ago.

Brooke Gladstone: The Malaysian airliner.

Mstyslav Chernov: Yes. The Malaysian Airlines. I was one of the first journalists at the scene, filmed with 100 of bodies scattered across the field and melted plastic with human bones. It was horrifying. Most of those images never made it to screens because it was really too difficult, but I think if we would be filming this now, we could show much more. The limits to what international outlets are showing to their viewers have changed. There's just too many war crimes, it's just impossible to ignore it.

Brooke Gladstone: You're not worried about numbness or empathy fatigue in viewers.

Mstyslav Chernov: It's important to find balance. You cannot just bombard audience with blood and tears and expect people to care all the time. It needs context to show how people react and how they feel.

Brooke Gladstone: Speaking of reaction, there were a few moments in the film where you hear people expressing disdain for you and the crew being there, and then we saw a lot of people feeling quite the opposite.

Mstyslav Chernov: For most of the people, it was a chance to even just send message to their relatives. People would just come up to us on the street and ask to film them. Then they would just ask us, is Ukraine still exist as a country? How is Kyiv doing? How is Kyiv? Is Ukraine army resisting? Other people came and said, please keep filming. I think this also gives us good understanding of how not just a physical military siege works on psychology of people. It's also an information siege that destroys the society.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings to mind that when Global TV used some of your footage, Russian officials specifically labeled the footage you were able to get out from, say, the bombing at the maternity ward or the mass graves, as propaganda.

Mstyslav Chernov: They said we are information terrorists and that we staged everything. I think it's a part of the story because the story is not only what happens on the ground is the ripples of the information that is going across the planet influencing people.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a moment in the film that might have not worked at all, because you leave the present moment and you offer a montage of the terrible trials of the Ukrainian people in recent history.

Mstyslav Chernov: I think about all this country has been through over the past eight years, all that I filmed, revolution of Dignity, Crimea's annexation, Russia's invasion of Donbas.

Brooke Gladstone: The accurate smell of violence.

Mstyslav Chernov: MH17.

Brooke Gladstone: Seems to waft off the screen.

Mstyslav Chernov: Donetsk Airport siege, war that seems endless. We keep filming and things stay the same. Worse even, propaganda turns everything upside down.

Brooke Gladstone: That interlude offered some really essential context.

Mstyslav Chernov: It is coming after very hard moments, heartbreaking moments. I felt like we all needed time to reflect and prepare for what's coming next.

Brooke Gladstone: You've mentioned elsewhere that the footage was not taken to be a film. It was simply news dispatches.

Mstyslav Chernov: But further the siege went more we realized that we were the only ones who were sending anything from the city, any information, any footage. More I knew that I need to capture every minute. There are so many stories I was just told about or I got firsthand but was not able to film because I was hiding, I was afraid. That is a regret too, probably I just need to write those stories. I guess that's the only way to tell them.

Brooke Gladstone: You need to tell them all?

Mstyslav Chernov: They're so important somehow to be told. There's a story of a woman who is sitting in a corridor after we witness a birth of her child in the hospital, and before we find out that we are surrounded.

Brooke Gladstone: They aren't sure whether the child is alive and they keep smacking it and rubbing it, and then suddenly this triumphant.

Mstyslav Chernov: The doctors told me that birth is just like a ray of life from heaven for them. We walk back to the entrance of the hospital and I meet a woman who tells the story of her children that were killed by a shell in their basement. I have the footage of those children. It's not in a film. We thought it would be just too much, but later on we found her and we know that they buried their children in the yard of their house.

Then they left the city through the green corridor and they came back to rebury the children, and they didn't find them in a place where they were supposed to be. They went through these hundreds of bodies that were just piled up near the hospital to try to find the bodies of their children and they did just before they were dropped in the mass grave, to be lost forever, and they gave them a proper burial.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering about the policeman who helped you for a while, Vladimir, who asked to make a statement in front of the camera.

Vladimir: Russian troops commit war crimes. Our family, our women, our children need helps. Our people needs help from international society. Please help Mariupol.

Brooke Gladstone: I think every war reporter, maybe every reporter faces this question eventually, and they have to find an answer. Do you really believe you can make a difference?

Mstyslav Chernov: I faced that question exactly in 2014 while filming the MH17, and I thought the war is going to stop when the world sees this footage. It of course didn't. It just got worse. I don't have a lot of illusions about direct power of journalism. We are soldiers, we can't change the course of events. All we can do is just keep telling everyone about them, but there is something that was done.

Some families found their loved ones because they saw them in the photos and in the videos, and they were able to locate them in a city and extract them and save their lives. Authorities have used what we filmed to negotiate the green corridor, which also saved lives. This is like immediate direct effect that we can do. Whether we have an impact in the long term, I don't know.

I guess we'll see much later when we look back, but again, even if it just remains in history, even if the film remains as an evidence of what happened in the first days of full scale invasion, that's already a lot because we judge the world around us by watching news and reading headlines and through our screens. We understand our past through cinema, through documentary films, feature films, books. That's where these films are important for generations that are to come.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you want viewers to take away from this?

Mstyslav Chernov: I definitely want viewers to take away hope, and they do.

Brooke Gladstone: Viewers take away hope from this film?

Mstyslav Chernov: Despite so much desperation, hope is coming through because people see how Ukrainians resist, how they survive. That desperation does not give us strength to keep going. Hope does.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think is the most hopeful moment in your film?

Mstyslav Chernov: The birth of a child. After what we've seen, after all the children that have died, knowing that this is just a tiny fraction of what happened, seeing that a child was born and it's healthy, and now we know this child survived, that is the most crucial moment for me in the film and the most hopeful one.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much.

Mstyslav Chernov: Thank to you.

Brooke Gladstone: Mstyslav Chernov is a journalist and director of the 2023 documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol. He's also a novelist. His latest is called The Dream Time. [piano]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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