The chronicler and image reporter of the France Presse agency, Arman Soldin, was killed while he was on the front in the east of the country. Born in Sarajevo, but of French nationality, Soldin started working in 2015 in the AFP offices in Rome, then moved to London. He was chosen in the team leaving for Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict on February 24, 2022. Since September, he had settled in Ukraine and was the coordinator of the television team, moving continuously between the east and south of the country.
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 16.30 local time (15.30 in Italy) in the surroundings of Chasiv Yar, a town near Bakhmut, targeted daily by Russian forces. 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”, said the managing director of France Presse, Fabrice Fries, adding that Soldin’s death “is a terrible reminder of the risks and dangers journalists in the newspaper are faced with covering the conflict in Ukraine “. The director of the agency, Phil Chetwynd, paid tribute to the memory of a “brave, creative and tenacious” journalist.
Soldin had been video coordinator in Ukraine since September 2022 and traveled 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”. In another post Arman wrote: “A miracle that nobody was hit. We weren’t going to a ‘particularly dangerous place’, but we were most likely spotted by a Russian observation drone, despite the weather. The longest 30 seconds of the my life”. 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 eleventh media worker to be killed in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.
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, including in areas more difficult”, recalled the Europe director of AFP, Christine Buhagiar.