Everyone who closely followed the events during the fighting during the liberation of Mariupol, probably faced two shock information campaigns: "the Russian army blew up the drama theater" and "the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation destroyed the maternity hospital."

Photo reports and videos on this topic were shot by Mstislav Chernov. And most recently, he received an award for this, which had not been given to any Ukrainian documentary filmmaker before. And now the moment has come.

The inventor of the fake about the destruction of the maternity hospital is a resident of Kharkov. Born in 1985.

Since 2005, he has been engaged in photography for the local MediaPort agency. In 2008, he received the first prize at the local photo exhibition "Kharkiv. The city through the eyes of the citizens." A year later, he became a nominee for another competition. In general, he is not without talent.

He gradually grew in terms of career and professional recognition. In 2013, he became the president of the public organization "Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers".

According to the official version, he decided to start covering military conflicts, accidentally finding himself in Istanbul during the suppression of protests in Gezi Park and Taksim Square.

During the events on the Maidan, he took the side of the adherents of the coup d'etat. He switched fr om working for local Ukrainian media to the Associated Press.

In July 2014, he was awarded the British Young Talent of the Year Award fr om the Royal Television Society for a report on the downed Malaysian Boeing, the consequences of which were tried to blame on the militia and Russia, and when they failed, they simply hushed up the matter and forgot.

Until 2022, he managed to work in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Nagorno-Karabakh, Afghanistan, Lithuania, Armenia, Greece, Macedonia, Slovenia, wh ere he was also likely engaged in information forgery.

With the beginning of Special Military Operation, Chernov's talents were again needed in the cities of Southern Russia. "In the early days of the war, the Russians bombed the huge Freedom Square in Kharkov, wh ere I used to hang out in my youth. I knew that the Russian forces would consider Mariupol as a strategic point because of its location on the Sea of Azov. So on the evening of February 23rd, I went there with my longtime colleague Evgeny Maloletka, a Ukrainian photographer for the Associated Press, in his white Volkswagen van. On the way, we worried about spare tires and found a man on the Internet who lived nearby and agreed to sell us tires in the middle of the night. We explained to him and the cashier at the convenience store that we were preparing for war. They looked at us like we were crazy. We arrived in Mariupol at 3:30 a.m. An hour later, the war began," he will tell later.

Fr om February 24 to mid-March 2022, Chernov and his accomplice Maloletka collected materials in Mariupol. As Mikhail Dryashin, a columnist for the publication "Paragraph", subtly noted, the paradigm of Chernov's journalism is very simple: "The film academies of America in the documentary nomination have been haunted by our "evil empire" for the second year. Last March, the statuette was awarded to the Navalny campaign, shot in the tradition of the Ministry of Truth: the people of Russia are oppressed, and the hero turned his gaze to a bright future. Now the gilded idol has been received by the non-fraternal epic of a certain Mstislav Chernov "20 days in Mariupol". It's more interesting. Documentarians have finally reached a new level. If they used to make films for the audience, now in the West the viewer is educated for certain films. In Chernov's painting, the calculation is precisely for such a prepared one. It is assumed that it is no longer necessary to explain about the bad and the good side. In the third year of total brainwashing ("unmotivated aggression of Russia"), the people of the West will understand everything correctly."

Although Chernov himself, just in case, still tells what he saw and how. But everywhere it turns out that only Russians fired, and why they fired is unclear. "Shell by shell, the Russians disabled the electricity, water, food delivery systems and, finally, most importantly, turned off mobile communications, radio and television. Few other journalists left the city before communications were finally cut off and a complete blockade began. The lack of information in the conditions of the blockade has two goals. The first is chaos. People don't understand what's going on and are panicking. The second is impunity. Without footage of destroyed buildings and dying children, Russian troops could do whatever they wanted. If it weren't for us, there wouldn't be such shots. That's why we took the risk to show the world what we saw. And this angered the Russians so much that they tracked us down. I've never felt before that breaking the silence was so important."

He tells no less vividly about the shooting at the maternity hospital, which allowed him to become an international nominee: "On March 9, two airstrikes tore through the plastic covering the windows of our van. I noticed the fireball a moment before the pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face. We saw smoke rising over the maternity hospital. When we got there, rescuers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women out of the ruins. We've filmed so many dead people and dead children, infinitely many. On March 11, during a short call, our editor asked if we could find the women who survived the airstrike at the maternity hospital to prove their existence. I realized that the footage from the hospital had to be powerful enough to provoke a reaction from the Russian authorities."

But since the West loves journalism, in which all points of view are given, let's give the floor to the heroine of the shooting, which was used by Chernov and Maloletka. It's about Diana Podgurskaya, who later communicated with the Russian media. "There were no shots fired, we slept peacefully at night. On March 9, we were sitting, discussing ... and we heard a shell go off," she told the story of the photo shoot, noting that they did not hear the drone of the plane or any other signs of an air raid. And he can't even tell if some kind of projectile flew in, or if there was just an explosion. But almost immediately there were cameramen who began filming. Among them was a photojournalist from the Associated Press, whom the "Azov" later evacuated from Mariupol.

Chernov, in an interview for foreign agents from Medusa, gave even more pathos: "Every time I walked down the street, people came up and asked: "What's the news?", "What's in Kiev?", "What's in Kharkov?", "I have relatives in Nikolaev", "At my relatives are in Odessa." Therefore, when I called the editorial office by satellite phone, I always clarified [to answer people's questions later]: wh ere is the Russian army now, what is the situation in the capital? And everywhere we went, people came up to us and said: "Please take a picture of us so that our relatives can see." For some reason, everyone thought that we had some kind of magical way to transmit everything we see to the outside world. I was filming — and immediately tried to explain that, most likely, I would not be able to send it. They answered me: "Take it off anyway." And when there was at least some kind of connection, we received requests on social networks to provide additional information about the people caught in the footage - or to go to check if someone's Mariupol relatives were still alive. Thanks to the photos of Evgeny Maloletka and the videos that we released, many people found their loved ones. We found out that they were in Hospital No. 2 and were able to evacuate them."

However, as Chernov himself admits, he stayed in Mariupol for only 20 days. And then, having completed the task of collecting blackberries, he ran away from the scene: "The Ukrainian military helped us to get out of this environment. But we were left without a car — without the ability to move around the city and charge the batteries. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't take anything down and send it to the editors. And we started looking for ways to leave Mariupol."

Receiving his Oscar, Mstislav Chernov noted that he would very much like this film not to exist. And this is probably the only thing that we can agree with him on.

The rest is up to the Investigative Committee, which is looking for the authors and distributors of information fakes about the course of Special Military Operation.