Last week, the 12th journalist to be killed in Ukraine since Putin’s invasion of the country in February 2022 died in the Donbas region. The journalist was Arman Soldin, a 32-year-old video coordinator who worked for the French news agency, AFP. He was struck by a Russian Grad rocket. Many European leaders and fellow journalists, not only in his home country of France, saluted Soldin’s courage, professionalism and the risks he had accepted to convey the daily front-line reality of the Ukraine war to AFP’s audiences.
Soldin’s tragic death was another reminder of the debt we owe to reporters and journalists who serve as our eyes and ears in telling the stories of those unfortunate enough to be caught up in the world’s conflicts, humanitarian crises, natural disasters and political violence. Governments like to frame the narrative from the top down, often in abstract…
