The Russians chased us.

They had a list of names that we were on and they were closing in fast.

We were the only remaining international journalists in Mariupol and we have been documenting the Russian siege of the city for two weeks now.

We were reporting from a hospital when gunmen came into the corridors of the building.

The doctors gave us white hospital gowns to wear as camouflage.

Ben Kuhlman

picture editor.

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Soldiers shouted, "Where the hell are the journalists?"

I saw their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to decide if they were Russians in disguise.

I stepped forward to identify myself.

"We're here to get you out of here," they said.

The walls of the operating room shook under artillery and rifle fire.

It almost seemed like it was safer inside.

But the Ukrainian soldiers had orders to take us with them.

We ran into the street, leaving behind the doctors who had protected us, the pregnant woman who had been shot and the many people who had to sleep in the hospital corridors because they had nowhere else to go.

It felt cruel to leave them all behind.

We reached a driveway from which armored vehicles took us to a dark vaulted cellar.

Only here did we learn why the Ukrainian soldiers had risked their lives to get us out of the hospital.

"If they catch you, they will force you in front of the camera to say that everything you filmed is a lie," they said.

"All your effort, everything you did in Mariupol would have been in vain."

The officer who had previously asked us to show the world his dying city pleaded that we should go.

He pushed us towards the crowds of battered cars all trying to leave the city.

That was March 15th.

We had no idea if we were going to get out alive.

As a teenager from Kharkiv, not far from the Russian border, I learned how to use a gun in school.

It seemed pointless to me, as I thought Ukraine would be surrounded by friends.

After school I began documenting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nagorno-Karabakh to show the world the devastation first hand.

When the Americans and Europeans then withdrew their employees from the Kiev embassies and I saw maps of the Russian deployment in the immediate vicinity of my hometown of Kharkiv, my only thought was: my poor country.

I knew that the Russian forces saw the eastern port city of Mariupol as some sort of strategic prize because of its location on the Sea of ​​Azov.

On the evening of February 23, I drove there in his white VW bus with my longtime colleague and AP Ukrainian photographer Evgeniy Maloletka.

We pulled into Mariupol at 3:30 a.m.

An hour later the war began.

Over the next few days, about a quarter of the city's 430,000 residents left while they still could.

However, many did not believe that a real war would come.

By the time many realized their misjudgment, it was too late.

With every single bomb, the Russians first cut off electricity, then water, food supplies and last but not least the cell phone network and the radio and television stations.

The few journalists in the city left before the last connections were gone and the city was completely blocked.