An AP team uses sourcing and initiative to piece together a breathtaking must-read on daring helicopter rescues from the Azovstal steel plant.
It was one of the most secretive episodes since the Russian invasion of Ukraine: a series of clandestine, terrain-hugging, high-speed helicopter missions beyond enemy lines to deliver desperately needed supplies to thousands of trapped fighters making a last stand at the Azovstal steel complex in the besieged city of Mariupol — and to fly out the injured.
Secretive, that is, until the AP team of correspondent John Leicester, photographer Natacha Pisarenko, video journalist Oleksandr Stashevskyi and freelance journalist/translator Hanna Arhirova provided an exclusive chronicle of one of the most daring feats of the five-month conflict. Leveraging military and intelligence contacts developed during the course of reporting in Ukraine, AP was first to tell the story from the perspective of both the rescued and the rescuers, with exclusive interviews in all formats.
Leicester’s text reads like a Hollywood script, but isn’t fiction. Interviews conducted by Leicester, Arhirova and Stashevskyi with two injured soldiers who were rescued by the flights, and who said the pilots had achieved “the impossible,” provided an astounding depth of detail that informed the powerful text and video. Pisarenko’s photos of the wounded young men as they underwent rehabilitation in a clinic were haunting for their intimacy.
Buffalo, the name he uses as a soldier, trains with his new prosthetic limb at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. On the evacuation helicopter out of Mariupol, a flight-crew member took his hand and told him not to worry, they’d make it home. “I told him, ‘All my life, I dreamed of flying a helicopter. It doesn't matter if we arrive — my dream has come true,’” Buffalo recalled.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
A doctor helps Buffalo train his new prosthetic limb at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, June 17, 2022. The junior sergeant, who lost his leg to mortar rounds, has a small yellow plastic bird attached to his new prosthetic limb because, “I have to be a serious man at work, but in my heart, I am a child.”
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Buffalo lies on a bed at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. The 20-year-old, whose leg was shredded by mortar rounds, owes his life to a series of daring, clandestine helicopter missions to reach Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant defenders in March and April.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Buffalo walks in a treadmill with his prosthetic limb at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. After losing his left leg above the knee, he was evacuated by helicopter from an underground bunker-turned-medical station at Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant that provided shelter from death and destruction above.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Buffalo speaks with a doctor at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Vladislav Zahorodnii, a 22-year-old corporal who was shot through the pelvis, shredding a nerve during street fighting in Mariupol, is interviewed by the AP at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. Zahorodnii was evacuated from the Azovstal steel complex by helicopter on March 31, after three failed earlier attempts. The aircraft took fire and lost one of its two engines; the other engine kept them airborne for the remainder of the 80-minute flight to safetly.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Vladislav Zahorodnii checks his phone at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. Zahorodnii met fellow patient Buffalo at the clinic. They already knew each other: Both were from Chernihiv, a city in the north surrounded and pounded by Russian forces. “Everything is fine, we will go clubbing soon,” Buffalo told him.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Vladislav Zahorodnii exercises at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. He marked his deliverance from Mariupol with a mortar-round tattoo on his right forearm: “I did it not to forget,” he said.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Vladislav Zahorodnii receives rehab massages at a clinic in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. The 22-year-old corporal was evacuated by helicopter after he was shot through the pelvis, shredding a nerve, during street fighting in Mariupol in March.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
The team was able to pair those soldier interviews with pilot interviews provided by Ukraine’s military. They compared details from one of the pilots to details described by one of wounded soldiers, determining that the two men had almost certainly been on the same flight, and so were able to weave their accounts into a compelling narrative in a way no other media could.
Stashevskyi also secured an exclusive on-camera interview with a military intelligence officer who’d been on the first such flight and said the missions were so dangerous that “we were aware it could be a one-way ticket.” He also confirmed that at least three flights never made it back.
The package was a must-read, must-see — AP’s best-performing offering of the day, with top reader engagement scores — and was widely used by clients, from The Washington Post to Italy’s Corriere Della Sera. Paul Haven, global head of newsgathering, called it “One of the best stories we’ve done during the war, which is saying something.” An admirer on Twitter praised “the kind of old-school print journalism that produced Ernie Pyle.” Another said the “harrowing account ... reads like a thriller.”
For enterprising work that delivered a riveting all-formats package, the team of Leicester, Pisarenko, Stashevskyi and Arhirova is AP’s Best of the Week — Second Winner.
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