Eugene Malolietka

On February 23, the Associated Press team including Eugene Malolietka, Mstyslav Chernov and Vasylisa Stepanenko set off from Bakhmut to Mariupol. They arrived there about 3:30 am, half an hour before Russia’s full-scale invasion began. During the next few days, the enemy troops encircled the city. Over the next few weeks, the world learned about what had been going on in Russian-besieged Mariupol from Eugene’s and his colleagues’ photos and videos.

"That was exactly what we intended,” Eugene shares. “We had expected Mariupol to be encircled, and we prepared for that. There’s at least the possibility of something like this that you should never deny. The decision itself was rather difficult to make, but it was worth it.”

Even before the full-scale invasion, the three journalists decided to stay in Mariupol until the moment of general evacuation. Overall, they spent twenty days there, risking their lives while moving around the permanently shelled and bombarded city in their own car, in ambulance carriages or in mortuary vehicles. They slept wherever they could: in rented apartments, at a hotel, sports center, hospital, or emergency station. Due to the never-ending bombardments, Eugene and his colleagues could hardly ever sleep in real beds, and were compelled to sleep on the corridor floors. They still managed to receive their sleeping bags and a satellite phone, but not satellite internet. So they had to cut every video into twenty fragments, then number and send each one to the editor one by one in the lowest quality possible, convert their photos from RAW to JPEG files, and shoot as prudently as they could. The only place the journalists were able to send their materials from was the hospital, where the signal still reached.

“I have plenty of indelible memories from Mariupol,” says Eugene. “Like, for instance, the dead children brought to the hospital, or the small boys killed while playing football, or the bombarded maternity ward. It was all way too awful to watch.”

Eugene took photos that made symbols of the siege of Mariupol – for example, those from the maternity ward. One of his protagonists, Iryna Kalinina, known as the wounded pregnant woman on a stretcher, later died, and so did her baby, while Marianna Podgurska, captured on another of Eugene’s pictures, survived and became a promoter of the so-called ‘Russian world’ idea in Russia.

Eugene and his colleagues evacuated Mariupol on March 15. One of the international organizations’ missions was leaving the city, so the journalists decided to join their column. In a battered car, they sat together with their driver, his wife and child, among their own equipment and a flash drive containing footage which the famous Ukrainian paramedic Yuliia ‘Tayra’ Payevska had shot before she was taken captive, buried deep beneath the kid’s dirty clothes.

Eugene sat in the front seat, holding his backpack and suitcase, and could see almost nothing through the cracked windshield. So he kept his eyes on a small icon depicting the Virgin and Child which was pasted in front of him. The journalists did not manage to catch up with the organization they previously meant to join, but they still passed fifteen Russian checkpoints and made it to Ukrainian-controlled territory together with representatives of the Red Cross.

About the same days, Eugene’s family evacuated from the occupied town of Berdiansk.
After Eugene got out from Mariupol, at first he just wanted to hide from everyone. Nevertheless, he returned to work very soon.

“I do not regard ourselves as great journalists,” says Eugene. “We were just doing our job. That was important then, whereas now it’s important to keep up the level of media concern about what’s going on in our country. The missile strikes and casualties must not become just casual background information. We have to remember that nothing like this is ever normal.”
Eugene has been documenting almost all the main episodes of this war. One of his latest reports was from Dnipro, where a Russian missile hit a nine-story apartment block.

“We came as soon as possible because obviously there were multiple casualties,” he says. “Everything depends on the agenda set by the news media. Unfortunately, it’s the number of casualties that raises media concern about the subject. That strike on a big apartment block occurred in a big city, so the photos turned out to be quite impressive. This situation resembles the one with Bakhmut and Soledar: many talk about the harsh battles there, but few mention no less a danger along the borderline between the Kharkiv and Luhansk oblasts. Sometimes we dull down our own vision of such tragedies ourselves; yet the main thing is that we do not lose it completely.”

It’s the presence of journalists in any city that determines whether the world learns about the Russian crimes. For example, an airstrike in Izium demolished a house and caused 54 civilian casualties, which is the largest number Eugene knows of. But not a single reporter was in the town to cover that.

He considers it of crucial significance to show the impact of war on people’s lives and emotions.

You can plan some minor moments, but journalistic luck is much more important. Wars are very similar in many countries, it’s just the military technologies that vary. The situation you find yourself in is the only thing that matters.

Such a job empowers Eugene with more wisdom, rage, and maturity, but it also makes him risk even more. His every trip increases the risk and reduces his reserve of luck for the next assignment. Being lucky for a war correspondent means coming back home after a mission.

“Staying around while everything’s going off is a pure lottery,” says Eugene. After a while, he goes on: “Anyway, it’s our country: we know how to work here. We know the language and places to be, we understand our fellow Ukrainians’ mentality, we can, after all, navigate the informational flow.”

Eugene considers himself emotionally stable because he had spent the previous eight years working in the Donbas. For him, it was like a preparation for greater events. At some point before 2022, the war became a difficult issue to cover, since nothing had changed at the frontline for months, but Eugene knew that it was just a temporary lull and, sooner or later, that abscess had to burst. Russia did not create its puppet republics just like that.

Eugene admits that human beings can get used to almost everything in a year, even to reading obituaries. He has seen many reports of his protagonists’ deaths. For him, those are not just numbers on a list but real people: friends, colleagues and soldiers.

“None of this should be happening to our fellow Ukrainians,” states Eugene. “The nation is now going into the red. Take, for instance, the girl saved from the ruins of her apartment in Dnipro. It was only in autumn that her boyfriend was killed at the frontline, and now her parents have also died in this horrible missile attack. My colleague from Hromadske took a very powerful photograph of her".

Eugene does not believe, as did the deceased Max Levin, that a single photo could allegedly stop a war. Yet, he believes that a photo can change people’s perception of current events and help to understand them better. His job is more than just taking photos for publication in the media. Eugene considers it his duty to document Ukrainian history.

That’s why today the frontline assignments alternate in his life with trips to prestigious exhibitions and world cinema festivals. Travelling from Bakhmut to Sundance is not just a metaphor for Eugene.

“It’s not about awards,” says he, “but using different platforms to tell the world about Ukraine. People abroad are interested in our history, though it’s not that easy for some of them to understand it properly. Then we can come and give them firsthand information about what we saw.”

Such work can effectively counteract Russian propaganda into the bargain. Eugene believes that the truth must prevail. Many Russian journalists continue spreading ideas about the ‘Russian world’ in Europe, so Eugene knows that the war is unlikely to end in 2023, and foresees that a lot more events are to come.

“What should I do about all this?” he finally asks. “Take a rest? I don’t think so. I must go on working. Everyone has their own job. Making news and spreading it worldwide is ours. And it’s of the utmost importance. The only option for us is to take a break to recover, and then work on in a normal mode. Figuratively speaking, no power bank would be of help if your inner batteries are dead.”

Eugene dreams of not having to document the war someday. He wants to stop being hostage to his own adrenaline, which drives him to dig deeper in his search for more and more moments of significance for history.

But frankly, he still dreams of being the first to take a photo of the Ukrainian flag at the square near the Drama Theater in liberated Mariupol.