Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka, reporters for The Associated Press, as well as producer Vasilisa Stepanenko and AP’s European reporter Lori Hinnant, have been awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in the Public Service nomination.
It is the only prize in the programme that awards a gold medal.
Chernov, Maloletka, and Stepanenko were the only reporters of Western media outlets to have worked in Mariupol, a city in east Ukraine that was under the Russian siege, in the spring of 2022. They were the ones who produced a dispatch from the Mariupol maternity ward that was shelled by the Russian military.
The AP team also won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography, shared between Maloletka, Bernat Armangue, Emilio Morenatti, Felipe Dana, Nariman El-Mofty, Rodrigo Abd and Vadim Ghirda.
The New York Times was honoured with an international reporting award for its coverage of Russian killings in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
After the start of the Russian invasion, Maloletka was one of the few photo journalists in Mariupol. His picture from the Mariupol maternity ward won another prestigious journalism award last month, World Press Photo. In the picture, a wounded pregnant woman is being carried on a stretcher during shelling.
The woman in the photo, Iryna Kalinina, 32, died of injuries half an hour after delivering a stillborn child.
The Pulitzer Award is one of the most prestigious accolades in journalism, awarded in 20 categories since 1917.
