Another journalist who fell to report the horror of the conflict in Ukraine. The chronicler and image reporter of the France Presse agency, Arman Soldin, was killed yesterday while he was on the front in the east of the country. This was announced by the French press agency itself, one of the three most important in the world, for which Soldin worked as video coordinator.
The 32-year-old reporter died in an attack with Grad rockets, said colleagues from France Presse who were with him, all unharmed. The bombing took place around Chasiv Yar, a locality near Bakhmut , a city in Donetsk where the bloodiest battles have been fought for weeks now.
The AFP journalists, who travel regularly to the epicenter of the fighting, were with the Ukrainian military when they found themselves in the fiery inferno. «The whole agency is devastated», declared the managing director of France Presse, Fabrice Fries, adding that Soldin's death «is a terrible reminder of the risks and dangers faced by journalists in the newspaper covering the conflict in Ukraine » .
Soldin had been video coordinator in Ukraine since September 2022 and went to the front very often. On May 1, he had posted a video of him under a shower of rockets on his Twitter profile: "One of the worst experiences I've had since I've been in Ukraine - he wrote on Twitter -, with explosions less than fifty meters away. Pure terror."
The young journalist had been among the France Presse reporters who covered the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. « He was enthusiastic, energetic, courageous. He was a true field reporter, always ready to go, even in the most difficult areas ,” recalled AFP Europe director, Christine Buhagiar. Recruited in Rome in 2015 as an intern, before joining the London Correspondence Office the same year, Arman, of French and Bosnian origins, was born in Sarajevo. A video of him and his colleagues has also been circulating on social media in recent days when they rescued a battered hedgehog that ended up in a trench. He is at least the 11th media worker to be killed in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.