“I was absolutely convinced I was going to die”
Stuart Ramsay, the chief correspondent for Sky News, was wounded when his crew came under fire in Ukraine on February 28. One month later, he is now recovering from surgery and talking about his harrowing experience. Ramsay and senior foreign producer Dominique Van Heerden spoke with me about how they fled the ambush; hid inside a warehouse for several hours; and evacuated the area with the help of Ukrainian police.
When bullets blasted through the news crew’s car, Ramsay said, “I kept thinking, you know, ‘I am going to die’ … ‘I wonder if it’s going to hurt.’ And then I got hit and it didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it was going to.” He figured that was due to the adrenaline pumping through his veins.
For some of his colleagues, the scariest moments came later, as they sought to hide from the attackers. Everyone thankfully made it out of the country alive. Unfathomably, Van Heerden said, “what happened to us was the good outcome,” since other journalists have been killed in similar attacks.
“I hope people understand the price that journalists pay, you know, to bring them the truth,” Van Heerden added. “Because in Ukraine, right now, it’s a very high price.”
There is no safe place” in Ukraine
VOA’s Sirwan Kajjo interviewed Ukrainian journalist Andriy Tsaplienko about being struck by shrapnel while reporting in Chernihiv on March 25. “Now there is no safe place in Ukraine,” Tsaplienko said. Once he has fully recovered, he said, “I should go back to the job and continue telling the world what’s going on in this war…”
Eye in the sky can change how we cover war
Commercial satellite imagery is changing the way we bear witness to war. Very little reporting is coming out of Mariupol, Ukraine right now, but the space tech company Maxar was able to peer into the city earlier this week and see long lines outside a supermarket on Tuesday. When I saw the image, I felt helpless, and I wondered how Maxar execs felt.
Stephen Wood, a longtime Maxar exec, joined me on Thursday’s “Reliable Sources Daily” on CNN+, and said the imaging tech can show the world what’s happening “where otherwise it might be too difficult, too dangerous, frankly too expensive to get to these areas. We can do that with our satellites.”
And it can be seen in near-real-time. Wood said the imagery from Mariupol has been the most “dramatic” he has seen during the war thus far. “I’ve looked at a lot of images over the years,” he said. “But seeing those lines of people waiting desperately for food at the grocery store in western Mariupol; seeing the Mariupol theater with ‘children’ written in Russia right in front of the theater right before it was struck with precision weapons; you can’t be insensitive when you see that. And with the level of detail we can now see from space, it becomes very very apparent…”
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