Journalists working for Ukraine's public broadcasting company were safely evacuated from the eastern city of Lysychansk after coming under heavy Russian artillery shelling on Monday, the news agency revealed.
''Our journalists Khrystyna Havryliuk and Taras Ibragimov and their colleagues came under fire in the center of Lysychansk,'' the Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine wrote in a Telegram post. ''The Armed Forces evacuated them, and no one was injured.''
Later in the post, the news agency reported the Ukrainian military informed its journalists that ''Lysychansk is shelled almost every day,'' with Russian forces able to ''cover entire areas'' due to advantages in artillery capabilities.
''In such conditions, about 15,000 civilians remain in the city,'' the broadcaster said, putting Lysychansk down more than 85,000 from its pre-war population of 103,459 in 2014.
The Ukrainian journalists were lucky to come out unharmed, with a shockingly large number of news correspondents having been injured or killed since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.
According to Reporters Without Borders, two Ukrainian and three foreign journalists were killed within the first month of the invasion.
Since then, two others — Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius and French camera operator Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff of BFM TV — were also killed. Kvedaravičius died while filming a documentary on the conflict.
TIME Editor in Chief Edward Felsenthal and the company's COO, Ian Orefic,e grieved in a heartfelt statement on March 13 regarding the death of filmmaker Brent Renaud, who died after Russian troops opened fire on his vehicle outside Kyiv.
''In recent weeks, Brent was in the region working on a TIME Studios project focused on the global refugee crisis,'' the magazine executives wrote. ''Our hearts are with all of Brent's loved ones. It is essential that journalists are able to safely cover this ongoing invasion and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.''
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