Greetings to my esteemed friends on the InformationWar platform, I wish you guys all the best ahead of your days activities. I've been pondering why journalists are being killed everyday in course of performing their duties both during war times and their everyday job.
I believe that the reasons are multifaceted in nature, but very difficult to determine whether they're being killed because of the reports they give about a particular incident or they're ignorantly killed alongside the war casualties.
It should be noted that since the war in Ukraine began, at least 23 journalists have been killed in Ukraine and many more which haven't been notified and discovered by the Ukrainian Union of Journalist.
The question is, how will I feel if my loved one was among the journalist killed in the course of the Ukrainian war?
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, at least 23 journalists have been killed in the country, according to a journalists’ union. And at least seven of those deaths took place while the journalists were on assignment, says the Committee to Protect Journalists. Oleksii Kovalenko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Kostiantyn Golubchyk.Source
It's actually very difficult for anyone or body to protect journalists during war situations such as the one in Ukraine. This is because the Russian military are using airstrikes and the airstrikes cannot identify a journalists or the enemy.
Two Ukrainian journalists and three foreign journalists have been killed in the course of their work in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion on 24 February. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Russian and Ukrainian authorities to guarantee the safety of media personnel in Ukraine. Attacking journalists is a war crime.Source
In every war situations, it's usually the duties of the warring states to protect journalists who are covering the war, but at some points, these safety laws are breached by the military personnel in the battlefield, which is an abberation of International Humanitarian Laws.
Below will be the records of some journalists who died in Ukraine:
- The latest victim was one of the few Russian journalists in Ukraine, Oksana Baulina. She was killed in the capital, Kyiv, on 23 March by a “kamikaze drone” – an aerial combat drone containing an explosive, according to her news organisation, the Latvian-based Russian online investigative media outlet The Insider.Source
Her death came as a result of her investigation on the previous airstrikes on a shopping centre in Podil, a suburb of Kyiv.
The next was US TV channel Fox News crew attacked by an artillery fire in Horenka, near, Kyiv, on 14 March. Pierre Zakrzewski, a 55-year-old cameraman who was used to covering wars, and Olexandra Kuvshynova, a 24-year-old Ukrainian journalist working for Fox News as a fixer. British journalist Benjamin Hall sustained serious leg injuries from shrapnel in the same attack.Source
The other victims were Brent Renaud and Juan Arredondo, all from the US. Both of them were filming in Kyiv on the 13 March when they were attacked and were both hospitalized.
All of these are indications that investigative and battlefield journalists are constantly attacked during wars and in course of performing their duties. The only issue there is that, it's very difficult to separate between journalists that were killed for the reports or information they've gathered and those ones killed by military personnel during the course of the war.
It's good the warring states as well as the international community to protect journalists on duty during war period, because they're preserving documents for the next generations to come.
Stop the killing of journalists in Ukraine and Russia today. Journalism is a noble profession.