Spotlight 10 Informed


Efrem Lukatsky/AP/Shuterstock Under Russian fire


Ian Burrell explains how courageous eye-witnesses have thwarted determined campaigns of disinformation


Nothing has conveyed the sheer bloody horror of the war in Ukraine like the reporting of Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka, the last international journalists to remain in the besieged and flatened city of Mariupol. Tey dodged airstrikes and shells to


tell the world of the carnage, picturing burials in mass graves and the bombing of a maternity hospital. “I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in,” reflected Chernov. For weeks they kept the stories coming, using flimsy internet connections to relay pictures to colleagues at Associated Press. All the while, Russian soldiers hunted for them amid the ruins and Kremlin propagandists sought to discredit their work, until they had to escape. Night aſter night, British television audiences have watched figures such as Clive Myrie and Reeta Chakrabarti of the


BBC and Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, usually seen in well-lit studios in London, presenting from rooſtops in Kyiv and Lviv, as Vladimir Putin’s forces draw closer and refugees head for the borders in their droves. Te live broadcasts have brought an immediacy to the war that can be disconcerting. Te presence of such familiar faces so close to the fighting does not mean they are immune from danger. Te experience of being a presenter while air raid sirens are sounding or reporting from urban frontlines that are “fluid” is “absolutely nerve-wracking”, says Mat Frei, who hosted Channel 4 News from Ukraine for a month aſter the invasion. “You feel incredibly vulnerable. You are not protected by anything and no one cares about your press sign – if anything it makes you a target. Your nerve ends are at fever pitch because you are always trying to work out through your senses – smell, sounds, sight – what is going on and is this dangerous.” Frei, a veteran of numerous hot spots,


contrasts the Ukraine war to the Balkans conflict, where journalists travelled in armoured cars hired by their media organisations. “We are driving around in normal cars. Driving around Ukraine in something that looks like an armoured car is dangerous because you look like a combatant even if it has got TV writen on it.” At the start of the invasion a Sky


News team was ambushed outside Kyiv by what they believed to be a squad of Russian saboteurs. Bullets riddled the car, smashing the windscreen and shredding the dashboard as the journalists tried to shelter in the footwells before crawling towards safety. Sky’s Stuart Ramsay was wounded and cameraman Richie Mockler was also hit. “It’s just a miracle that they weren’t killed. Te cameraman was saved by the body armour,” says Frei, who spoke to the Sky team shortly aſterwards in Kyiv. Other journalists have been less


fortunate. American filmmaker Brent


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