Informed 11


Renaud died aſter being shot in the neck by Russian fire in Irpin. Irish cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova, both working for Fox News, died in Russian shelling outside Kyiv. Evgeny Sakun, a cameraman for Kyiv Live TV, died during an atack on the city’s transmission tower. Oksana Baulina, a Russian journalist who formerly worked for opposition leader Alexander Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and had emigrated to Warsaw, was killed by Russian shelling in a shopping centre in Kyiv. Jonathan Levy, head of newsgathering


at Sky News, says that eye-witness reporting is essential in a conflict that has been dogged by determined campaigns of disinformation. “War is notoriously foggy and it’s our job to make it clearer and to help people understand what’s going on and perhaps the most irreducible component of that is being on the ground to see what’s happening.” He noted that with services such as GB


News and Rupert Murdoch’s planned TalkTV puting an emphasis on debate formats, audiences are showing a hunger for frontline journalism. “Tese new entrants to the news market based on talk and chat and discussion have their place, but it’s really vindicating to see that there’s still very much a place and an appetite for proper news reporting which is hard to do,” he said. Tese are different reporting conditions from the last “conventional” war when many journalists were embedded with western forces as they went into Iraq in 2003. “Tis is a conflict with shiſting and sometimes imperceptible frontlines,” says Levy. “We have deployed very experienced people with the right support, right security advice and right equipment but the key thing is to not end up on the wrong side of the lines.” Te NUJ has been working with its


Ukrainian sister unions, the NUJU and IMTUU, to provide practical support for journalists on the ground, including


provision of protective equipment and medical supplies. NUJU has set up a hotline for all media working in Ukraine. “We have seen cases of employers sending their staff and freelances to cover that conflict without deploying their own duty of care to make sure they have got all the necessary protections and kit, which I think is prety shocking,” says Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary. Te NUJ is working with the


International Federation of Journalists and European Federation of Journalists, which are establishing a logistics hub in Poland. But Michelle warned that some inexperienced journalists have travelled to the conflict zone very under-prepared. “I have had emails from people who have pitched up and asked where they could get a flak jacket and a helmet. We are trying to advise people to be as prepared as they possibly can be before they go out.”


Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s interim


director of news, appealed to news outlets to boycot raw and “cavalier” journalists: “My message is don’t encourage them, don’t buy their material, don’t allow them a market because safety and the preservation of their lives is more important.” He praised the incredible personal courage of reporters in the field but stressed that safety is the BBC’s number one priority. Much of the media corps in Kyiv is based in two international hotels with basements and underground carparks where journalists can shelter. Large numbers have now decamped to the western city of Lviv but doughty correspondents such as the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, Alex Crawford of Sky News and Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News remain in the capital. “Tey hate the foreign press in Moscow


so I wouldn’t be surprised if they went for one of the hotels if it got nastier,” says Frei. “Te main danger is that you are in the middle of a city which, according to their best practices, they will try to pulverise.”


If the focus of the war shiſts to the Donbas, journalists will atempt to follow the story. Tis is different from 2003 when it was western forces doing the advancing and journalists “could make certain assumptions about the way that they would behave”, says Levy. We are now facing, Munro warns, a “potentially rather vicious period ahead”.


News block For independent media in Russia the war in Ukraine has been a calamity. Staff at the television station Dozhd (Rain) filmed themselves filing out of the newsroom shouting “I á pasaran!” as the network was closed by the Kremlin. Echo of Moscow, a liberal- leaning FM radio station, found itself replaced by the sound of static. Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, who won a Nobel Prize last year for his paper’s fiercely independent reporting, has now said he will cease operations until the end of the war aſter receiving a second warning from the state censor for allegedly violating the country’s “foreign agent” law. Te Russian media must describe the conflict as a “special military operation”; calling it a war risks 15 years in jail. Te BBC, which is blocked by the Kremlin, has told Russia-based staff to abide by the draconian law (although London content does not). Some journalists have rebelled. Channel 1 editor Marina Ovsyannikova protested against the war on-air and was fined. Lilia Gildeeva, an anchor for NTV, resigned and fled the country. Russian state media continues to promote Vladimir Putin’s message that Ukraine is being cleansed of “neo-Nazis” Novaya Gazeta journalist Nadezhda Prusenkova told Voice of America:“Journalism has been lost in Russia – independent journalism doesn’t exist anymore.”


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