Annual Report 2022

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son, at their home in a residential neighbourhood of the

Ukrainian capital.

An hour later, explosions were heard in Mariupol and Kra-

matorsk (East), then in Odessa (South), and Kharkiv, on the

border with Russia.

At 06:15 (0515 GMT), air raid sirens blared out in Kyiv. There

was no room for doubt anymore: the war had started.

We were sending live video from the Maidan square in Kyiv,

from where these air raid sirens could be heard. One of our

three VJs in the country was deployed in the east, allowing

us to broadcast the first images of the war, plumes of smoke

rising from an airport bombed by the Russians.

The video pick-ups were enormous. For the first two days

of the war, they were three times higher than when the Tali-

ban took Kabul. Record numbers.

Daniel Leal remembers how “that morning, the faces

changed”. Families were suddenly torn apart. “As a father

myself, I identified especially with the parents and the

children,” said Daniel. “I have a seven year old, a five year

old and a baby on the way. It really broke my heart. I could

not help but see myself in their situation.”

When the Russians first started hitting Kyiv, the priority was

to move the Kyiv bureau and get everyone to shelter. The

team moved to the Mercure Hotel in the city and prepared

to stay there for several weeks. We started sending helmets,

bulletproof vests, protective kit against nuclear radiation

and chemical attack. This became useful on March 5 when

Russia attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in the south

of the country.

This bombing was a “threat to the whole world” and was

equivalent to “six Chernobyls”, said Ukrainian President Vo-

lodymyr Zelensky.

The team in Kyiv and Poland near the border acquired three

vehicles to ferry our teams around and put the finishing

touches to our staffing levels. Our local journalists and spe-

cial correspondents were hard at work. Text, photo and video

editors were spread across seven countries in the region.

Video production was handled by the video desk in London,

the Global Chief Editors were in Paris, and analytical stories

written by the International Hub (also at HQ in Paris).

It was a huge challenge for AFPTV, the first war on European

soil it could cover in its entirety. As the conflict wears on,

our production is becoming an impressive shop window.

Over the year, we had 1.5m pick-ups and published more

than 3,000 videos, unprecedented volume for a single event

over such a long period.

The region was on a war footing. We sent more than 80 mis-

sions to Ukraine, with a total of 70 people on the ground

since the end of February, split three ways across the disci-

plines (text, photo, video), with sometimes as many as nine

people deployed at once.

The cooperation between text, photo and video hit new

heights. Text journalists armed with smartphones produced

live video from Kyiv. In video, photo and text, we were the

first to arrive, on April 8, at Kramatorsk Station, which had

just suffered a direct hit from two Russian missiles. The ex-

plosion killed more than 60 and wounded hundreds. Since

then, we have reduced the number of missions. We have re-

cruited local journalists, about a dozen Ukrainians, in order

to reduce the amount of special missions.

We already had a solid network of Ukrainian photographers

even before the war started. They covered the war in 2014

and have good relations with the Ukrainian army in the

Donbas where one of our photographers regularly goes to

the trenches to cover the soldiers’ daily life there. We had

two special photo correspondents already in the field for a

few days. They are seasoned photographers and the clients

already know their bylines. The first photo of black smoke

rising from a bombed Ukrainian air field in the east made

the front page of The New York Times and several other in-

ternational media. It remains the most downloaded picture

from that first day of war.

After that, we organised five-week rotations, in the

knowledge that it took at least two days to get into Ukraine

and then two days to get out A lot of our journalists have

now done three tours We currently have three staff pho

tographers and five who are regular stringers or under

contract Photo editing had to be moved urgently to Paris

Normally images from Ukraine are edited in Moscow but we

quickly put a new system in place and our editors in Paris

were confronted with a lot of violent images they werent

necessarily used to seeing in Europe

For video we have a coordinator running the team which

comprises two VJs soon to be three We have a special

correspondent there almost all the time These are backed

up by a team of editors with two in Warsaw and one in the

UK Their role is among other things to pick up handouts

images offered to the media by institutions and Volo

dymyr Zelenskys daily video messages

,./

Black smoke rises from a military airport in Chuguyev near Khar-

Ukrainian servicemen carry a victim to be placed next to other

casualties after a bombing of the railway station in the eastern

vé Bar AFP