The Ukrainian war photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka has been awarded this Thursday by the World Press Photo Foundation for having captured the photo of the year: the scene in which the emergency services try to save the life of a mother who had just lost her baby in the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol.
“Kill me now!” pleaded Iryna Kalinina, a 32-year-old woman. In the photo of her, Ukrainian emergency personnel carry her on a stretcher from the Mariupol maternity hospital, damaged by an airstrike by Russian forces. In the background, destroyed trees and branches, a column of smoke and the skeleton of two buildings that have lost their windows due to the impact of the bombs that had fallen moments before.
“It is hard to receive an award for photos of people who have died. It is very painful to understand. They are horror photos. It is not why I would have wanted to receive an award. But hey, that’s it, this will stay with me for the rest of my life. Al At the same time, it is important to show the world what is happening in Ukraine,” Maloletka explained, her voice cracking.
Iryna Kalinina’s face describes the fatigue, but above all the pain of the horror that this mother had just survived. She still shows the belly of a pregnant woman, her black pants are stained with blood, and she appears lying on a stretcher supported by five men who run to another hospital, even closer to the front line, to try to save her life. Her baby was stillborn and half an hour later, Kalinina also passed away.
This photojournalist and his colleagues were 500 meters from the hospital when they heard the sound of airplanes in the sky and then numerous explosions, one of them in the hospital courtyard. About 25 minutes later, they arrived at the scene and saw that “all the buildings were damaged, not smashed because the bomb fell outside, but the windows were gone.”
“When we entered, the internal walls and ceilings were broken, and medical equipment was smashed. Police and rescue personnel were helping to evacuate pregnant women and people hiding in the basement. Pregnant women and children crying, some soldiers came looking for their loved ones. There was no military position there, no military equipment, just normal people in a hospital,” he explains.
Maloletka and her companions “realized that this was a moment that had to be shown to the world,” but it was very difficult to find electricity to charge the computer and send the images, and it was not until night, with the help of the neighbors, that sitting on a staircase and with their mobile phones raised looking for coverage, they were able to send the material and write to their loved ones to tell them that they are safe and sound.
Maloletka regrets that she can no longer return to the area until “it is not liberated from the Russians”, and that these images put her “on Russia’s blacklists”, but they also put enough pressure to open humanitarian corridors in Mariupol.
Evgeniy Maloletka, a war photographer, journalist and filmmaker from the Ukrainian city of Berdyansk (Zaporizhia), captured this tragic scene on March 9, 2022 in Mariupol, which fell under Russian control last May after months of siege.
He covers the war in Ukraine since 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, and has also done work on the protests of the Euromaidan movement, the protests in Belarus, the Nagorno-Karabakh war and the evolution of the covid-19 pandemic in Ukraine, collaborating with prestigious media such as the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel and others.
