Kharkiv police and a man claiming to be a security guard from a nearby factory forcibly dragged photojournalists Serhiy Bobok, Andriy Mariyenko, and Sofia Hatilova out of the grounds of a polyclinic that had been affected in a Russian air strike earlier, AFP stringer Serhiy Bobok reported in a Facebook post.

The journalist said that he and his colleagues, all stringers with international news agencies, had arrived at the site following a Russian strike on civilian infrastructure and entered the polyclinic’s courtyard freely, cameras in hand.

Photo via Serhiy Bobko on Facebook

Then, several police officers and a civilian man ran up to the journalists shouting that the polyclinic was a “strategic facility.” The man tried to wrench the camera out of Bobok’s hands in the police’s presence.

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“Then he and a police officer grabbed me by the arms, and they dragged me out through the polyclinic’s entrance by force. As they did so, they told me that people like me were the ones helping the Russian army aim their strikes on Kharkiv and that we just came here to make money,” Serhiy Bobok recounted.

The assailants treated Andriy Mariyenko in the same way, while photojournalist Sofia Hatilova was led out of the grounds after being knocked down onto the asphalt.

Serhiy Bobok remarked that the patrol officers only showed interest in checking the journalists’ documents when they were taking their crime report. After the journalists had been removed from the premises, other media workers were let in unhindered. Photos and footage from the location were later published by the official channels of the State Emergency Service (DSNS), the police, and the oblast military administration.

Serhiy Bobok added that he and his colleagues had filed an official police report over the use of physical force and the accusations of espionage.

In comments to IMI journalist Valentyna Troyan, he said that he and Sofia Hatilova had not been wearing PRESS insignia, while Andriy Mariienko had been wearing a badge with a printed copy of his credentials.

“Nobody asked us for documents, even though we said we were journalists and had accreditation,” the photojournalist remarked.

He said that neither Sofia Hatilova being pushed by an officer nor the accusations of “helping the Russian army” were captured on record. The incident occurred after he and Andriy Mariyenko had been removed from the site.

Serhiy Bobok aded that he had not seen whether the police officers were wearing body cameras and that the officers had ignored the media workers’ requests to state their surnames and ranks.

The media workers filed a report with the patrol police.

“I called the police immediately after the incident,” Serhiy Bobok remarked.

However, he said he did not know whether the data has been entered into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations under Article 171 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (obstruction of lawful reporting).

“We don’t know that. The police press service has confirmed that the reports had been registered, and that’s all. We’ve had air strikes every day, we’ve been working to cover each one, and there was the weekend on top of that, so we simply haven’t had the chance to send a query,” Bobok explained.

The photojournalist stressed that this was the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that he had encountered such a situation.

“Thank you for your attention to this situation. We are all stringers for news agencies (I’m with AFP, Sofia with Reuters, Andriy with AP), and we’ve been at strike sites constantly since the first day of the full-scale invasion (Sofia since May 2022). Conflicts occur regularly, but we’ve never seen such brazen behaviour by the police in all this time,” Serhiy Bobok said.

Earlier, the investigative journalism agency Chetverta Vlada reported that their journalists had faced obstruction by Rivne City Council staff during acting mayor Viktor Shakyrzian’s public report.