A video journalist working for Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, has been killed by rocket fire near the eastern Ukraine town of Chasiv Yar, Agence France-Presse said on Tuesday. Some of the toughest battles of the war are fought in and around the nearby city of Bakhmut.
The journalist, Arman Soldin, 32, and four colleagues were with Ukrainian soldiers when they fell victim to a Grad missile attack Tuesday afternoon, the agency said. Mr. Soldin was killed. None of the rest of the team, including a security adviser, was injured.
Mr. Soldin is the 17th reporter have been killed in Ukraine since 2022, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists. His death came just two weeks after one Ukrainian journalist was killed and an Italian journalist was injured in an attack on the way to the southern Ukraine town of Kherson.
Mr. Soldin was one of the agency’s first journalists to arrive in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion, and regularly reported from the front lines. He survived a rocket attack last week while reporting on soldiers who were digging trenches near Bakhmut.
Mr Soldin also shared lighter moments from the front lines – last month he rescued a wounded hedgehog found after Russian shelling in Chasiv Yar. Mr. Soldin and his colleagues built a makeshift shelter for the hedgehog, whom they named Lucky; collected insects for him to eat; and “started googling what baby hedgehogs need,” Mr. Soldin wrote on Twitter.
When Lucky finally took water from a bottle improvised from medical equipment, Mr. Soldin rejoiced, “I’M OFFICIALLY A FATHER!”
Mr Soldin, a French citizen born in Bosnia, was “courageous, creative and tenacious,” Phil Chetwynd, the agency’s global news director, said in a statement. “Above all, he was an excellent journalist who was completely committed to the story.”
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Mr Soldin on Tuesday. tweet that from the first hours of the conflict he had courageously stood at the front “to establish the facts. To inform us.” He added: “We share the pain of his loved ones and all his colleagues.”