Photo of pregnant woman in bombed-out Mariupol maternity hospital wins World Press Photo award

Jury says Evgeniy Maloletka’s photo ‘highlights the murder of future generations of Ukrainians’

Photo shows Iryna Kalinina, who died half an hour after giving birth to a stillborn child (AP/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A gut-wrenching photo of a pregnant woman in a bombed-out Mariupol maternity hospital has won the World Press Photo award this year.

The winning photo shows 32-year-old Iryna Kalinina, an injured pregnant woman being carried from a maternity hospital that was damaged during a Russian airstrike in Mariupol in March last year.

Her baby – named Miron after the word for “peace” – was stillborn. The World Press Photo website said Kalinina died half an hour after giving birth.

The jury said the photo by Evgeniy Maloletka “captures the absurdity and horror of war. It is an accurate representation of the year’s events and evidence of the war crimes being committed against Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces.”

It said the powerful image “rises as a deeply painful historical fact and highlights the murder of future generations of Ukrainians.”

Mr Maloletka is a war photographer, journalist and filmmaker from Berdyansk, Ukraine. He works as a chief photographer with the Associated Press.

He has been covering Ukraine since 2014, according to the World Press Photo website. The Ukranian photographer has also covered the Euromaidan Revolution, the protests in Belarus, the Nagorno-Karabakh war and the impact of the Covid pandemic in Ukraine.

The photo was shot last year in March when Russian forces attacked the maternity hospital in Mariupol. At first, Russia dubbed the report of the attack on the hospital – which resulted in three deaths and some 17 injuries – as fake news.

World Press Photo of the Year award winner, Associated Press photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, is interviewed in front of his winning image of a pregnant woman being carried through the wreckage of a maternity hospital after a Russian military strike in Mariupol (AP)

But later, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said it had been deliberate, claiming the hospital had been taken over by paramilitaries, and that patients and staff had been evacuated.

The Associated Press reported last year that after the attack on the hospital, Kalinina was taken to another hospital closer to the front line, where doctors tried to save her.

After realising she was losing her baby, doctors said she had cried out to them, “Kill me now!”

Her baby was delivered via cesarean section but showed “no signs of life”.

Doctors said Kalinina’s pelvis had been crushed and her hip detached. After she delivered, medics tried to save her but “more than 30 minutes of resuscitation of the mother didn’t produce results”.

An investigation by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe into the maternity hospital bombing revealed that the hospital was deliberately targeted by Russia and those responsible for the violence had committed a war crime.

World Press Photo noted that Mr Maloletka was one of the few photographers documenting events in Mariupol at the time.

“We came to Mariupol just one hour before the invasion. For 20 days, we lived with paramedics in the basement of the hospital, and in shelters with ordinary citizens, trying to show the fear Ukrainians were living with,” he said.