On the Ukrainian front, the challenges of providing information

By Catherine Triomphe

In ten months of war in Ukraine (February to December 2022), AFP has organised some 80 assignments for special correspondents to help its permanent office in Kiev cover this conflict on a scale unseen in Europe since the Second World War.

Coming from all over the world, these special envoys (text, photo, video), trained to report in hostile environments, are spending long periods in the combat zones of eastern and southern Ukraine, sailing close to the front lines.

In this blog, eleven of them explain the difficulties they have faced, and how their view of the conflict has changed over the years.

- Working with the army, "it's complicated": There are many constraints on the day-to-day work of journalists close to the front line. As well as the danger, they have to deal with the Ukrainian army, which grants - and sometimes withdraws - the accreditation they need to pass through the checkpoints that allow access to towns close to the fighting or newly recaptured.

"It's very difficult to work," says Dimitar Dilkoff, a Bulgarian photographer who was based in Moscow until the Russian invasion, and who has been in Ukraine ever since.

"If you take pictures and publish them, it's sometimes easy for the other side to spot the exact location and bomb it (...) Taking a photo can be very complicated. Sometimes it takes me a long time to explain that I don't want to use it straight away, that I'm keeping it for our archives."

"They only let you record what they want, what illustrates their successes," also says Aris Messinis, an AFP photographer in Athens, who has carried out several missions in Ukraine since 2014. "When they suffer losses, they don't allow it to be seen, even if they are wounded and not dead. They're afraid of breaking the morale of their troops or civilians."

"There's constantly the threat that if we go somewhere they don't want us to go, if we talk about something they don't want us to talk about, we'll lose our accreditation," points out Dave Clark, a Brussels-based journalist who has covered many conflicts for AFP over the past 20 years.

In practice, to avoid the risk of losing accreditation and to protect its journalists, AFP sometimes has to wait before broadcasting certain images, or does not specify their exact location. And sometimes "trick the army a bit", says Arman Soldin, a photojournalist usually based in London.

"You have to find the right balance, push as hard as you can to get access, without getting burnt out by the military", says Dylan Collins, a JRI based in Beirut. In this context, more and more visits enable us to build relationships with certain units and gain access that would have been impossible initially.

With certain brigades, "we now have excellent relations, either with commanders or with ordinary soldiers. We follow them, we keep each other informed, we send each other (messages on) Signal", says Daphné Rousseau, a Paris-based reporter who has carried out three missions in Ukraine since February.

In October 2022, these contacts enabled an AFP team to accompany a Ukrainian unit nicknamed Cargo 200, which specialises in collecting dead soldiers, to Sviatoguirsk in the Donetsk region. Or in November, to follow a unit of ambulance drivers bringing back wounded soldiers from the front near Bakhmout, which has become the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the Donbass.

But for Emmanuel Peuchot, who has been coordinating AFP's office in Kiev since October 2022, these opportunities are too rare to capture "all the violence" and "the butchery" of this conflict. In this war that has raised the spectre of a global explosion, neither side has revealed precisely the losses suffered so far.

- Tensions with civilians : Contacts with civilians can also be very tense, especially in the Donbass, where the war has been going on for almost nine years and where many of the inhabitants are pro-Russian.

Whatever their nationality, AFP reporters who have worked in the east of the country have at one time or another come into contact with hostile locals. The latter often consider journalists to be responsible for the bombing of their region.

Bülent Kilic, a photographer based in Istanbul, and Ionut Iordachescu, a JRI based in Romania, experienced a particularly tense moment in the almost-constantly bombed town of Bakhmout: as a cluster bomb fell very close to where they were standing, a local man lunged at them with a knife.

"It was really frightening," says Ionut. "But I can't blame him. They've been going through a very, very hard situation for a long time, they're traumatised."

"To be honest, when the journalists arrive, they hope something will happen, maybe see some dead people," says Bülent. "Attacking with a knife is unacceptable, but being angry I can understand."

Fortunately, the hostility is far from widespread. Dylan describes residents who are so used to artillery that they will "stop to answer your questions", despite nearby gunfire. Even in places like Bakhmout, where "a lot of people shout at us, we always find people" who want to talk, says Dave.

- Nuances" and a balance of sources : In eastern Ukraine, the conflict is less "Manichean" than in Kiev, Lviv or Odessa, where the patriotic Ukrainian discourse is omnipresent, points out Cécile Feuillâtre, a journalist based at the international service in Paris. The lines between aggressor and aggressed are more blurred, "that's what makes the Donbass so interesting, there are nuances".

There are also sometimes blurred lines between those labelled Ukrainian 'collaborators' or 'patriots', according to Daphné. On her first visit, she met a woman in Lyman, Donbass, who had been presented by a Ukrainian policeman as a pillar of the 'resistance' to the Russian offensive.

During her next visit, she learned that this woman had finally collaborated with the Russians and had left for Russia. These "reversals" can sometimes be explained by the simple need to receive humanitarian aid.

In some recently liberated towns, such as Kherson, the hunt for "collaborators" sometimes creates "a very heavy atmosphere", Emmanuel also points out. This is all the more true given that a feeling of ambivalence often prevails. Some of the inhabitants "just want (the war) to stop".

Gathering testimonies that allow these nuances to be understood takes time, especially when working with an interpreter.

They are all the more valuable because the reporters are unable to document directly the "other side" of the story, the Russian side of the front, as the news agency's rules on the balance of sources would dictate.

"Of course I'd like to see more of the other side, but it's impossible," says Nairobi-based photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba. "But I think we're doing 100% of what we can" to balance things out.

The Russian authorities severely restrict access to their frontline. Despite repeated requests and a permanent presence in Russia for decades, AFP has so far been unable to obtain a pass to follow the Russians in combat.

At most, in the spring, they were able to take part in a few visits to "conquered" towns organised by the Russian authorities for the press, such as Marioupol, Berdiansk and Kherson, before the latter was taken over by the Ukrainians.

AFP explained in its reports how these visits were organised. But this coverage earned it some "very angry" comments from the Ukrainian authorities, Dave points out.

These criticisms illustrate the information war being waged by the two sides, which we must constantly bear in mind," stresses Daphné. Seven years of covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has "served her well" in terms of not getting "caught up in the communication of one side or the other", she says.

In this area, the reporters are also supported by journalists from AFP's digital investigation department, who check and regularly dismantle misleading information about the conflict circulated on social networks.

- Back to Kiev :

By comparison, Kiev - where AFP specials usually finish their assignment, to catch a train back to Poland - is another world.

Those who didn't know Ukraine before the war often say they are struck by the capital's very European atmosphere, with its 'hipster' districts like those in Paris or Berlin," points out Bülent.

Since the resumption of Russian strikes, with their attendant cuts in electricity, water and heating, the war has become closer once again, and Kiev has lost the relative calm it still enjoyed in early autumn. In October, the first drone strike took place very close to Chiba, and the pictures of it went around the world.

But even though he had to work by candlelight during his last visit at the end of November, Bülent was able to see young Ukrainians dancing in a nightclub. This was one of the aims of his last visit: to find "images of people kissing, showing their love. Because in these conditions, deprived of electricity and water, with missiles hitting regularly, I can see that young people are seeking refuge in love."

Like other photographers, he hopes to capture moments that will remain emblematic of this war, once peace returns.

But nobody expects peace to come quickly. Now familiar with the Ukrainian front, the specials are preparing to go back, even if this long-running conflict no longer makes as much headlines in the Western media as it did at the start.

"I feel guilty at the end of every mission, because I can go back," says Chiba. "People who have taken refuge in caves don't have this opportunity to be free from fear."

"There's a certain fatigue from this conflict and that's normal, people can't stay connected 24/24 to what's happening in Ukraine," says Ionut. "Even my friends in Romania, so close to the border, are less interested in what's going on. But this weariness is a luxury that Ukrainians don't have. We have to continue our efforts and cover this war relentlessly.

Interview by Catherine Triomphe