People started dying very fast. On 27 February we saw how the doctor was trying to rescue a little girl who was hit with shrapnel. She died.

Then another child died. Then the third one. Ambulances stopped taking wounded people because there was no network connection and medical staff couldn’t be called as well as ambulances couldn’t get through bombed streets.

Doctors begged us to film the families that brought dead and wounded relatives and let us use the generator to charge our cameras. They said: “Nobody knows what is going on in our city.”
Bombing damaged the hospital and nearby houses. The windows of our van were broken, one side of the car was damaged and the tires were flat. Sometimes we ran out the hospital to film house on fire and then we were running trying not to be hit by bombs.

There was only one place with good network connection left – near a burgled grocery shop on Budivelnyky avenue. Once a day we went there and hid under the ladder to send photos and videos. The ladder couldn’t protect us but still we felt safer there than outside.

Signal had been gone by 3 March. We tried to send a video having climbed on the seventh floor of the hospital and got through the window. From there we could see the shopping mall “Port-city” being robbed and decided to get there while artillery and gun-machine were working. Tens of people were running from there while it was robbed and also approaching it through artillery and gun machine on. People were running out pushing carriages full of electronics, food, clothes.

Suddenly a missile hit the roof of the mall and I was thrown to the ground. I was shocked expecting the second hit. I was cursing myself for not turning on my camera to film it. The second missile followed, with an awful whistle it hit the house next to me. I hid behind the edge of the building.

There was a teenager who ran past me. He was rolling an office armchair packed with electronics. I saw some boxes falling down from it. “The missile hit 10 – meters away. There were my friends. I had no idea what had happened to them.”-he said.
We rushed to the hospital. For the next 20 minutes injured people started coming to the hospital, some of them were brought in carriages.

During some days the satellite telephone was the only means of communication with the outer world. And the only place where it worked was near the crater after a bomb. I sat trying to protect myself and catch the signal.
I was asked when the war was going to finish but I had no answer.
Rumors had it that the Ukrainian army was going to break the blockade but nobody did.

Mstislav Chernov