"I went on air without hiding my face:" Angela Slobodyan on working under occupation
Kherson-based journalist Angela Slobodian would go on air without hiding her face while the city was under occupation.
She spoke about this on Hromadske Radio.
"In two or three weeks or so I was thinking about obscuring my face when I would go live, but the thing is that the people who sided with the occupiers, that is, our collaborators in power, knew that I was the only person who could do live reports on Ukraine TV, as I was their only local correspondent at the time, so there was no point in hiding my face," the journalist says.
According to her, she managed to work like this for four months, and after that she was warned that staying home dangerous. She went into hiding.
"When they questioned me, I realized that the occupiers did not even understand that I was in Kherson at first, because I would always choose locations such as hotel rooms or halls with high walls for my streams, so that it was obvious that I was not in my apartment," Angela Slobodyan explained.
She said that her husband was always by her side, protecting her: he was walking first, and she was behind him filming on her phone.
"Filming under occupation is a form of art. For example, I once filmed a story about a trolleybus driver who drove around with a Ukrainian flag, and we were passing through checkpoints as I was filming. But I had two phones, one of them with Russian SIM-card, where I only had regular contacts and nothing else. I took care to clear up my work phone constantly," the journalist recalls.
According to her, the mobile connection disappeared completely several times. It first happened in March.
"It was very scary. You could catch a signal on the top of the embankment, and in the middle of the city there was a spot near a tree where the signal would work for some reason. But on May 1, the Ukrainian connection disappeared for three days. Then everyone switched to the Russian connection, because they needed a way to keep in touch with their families," the journalist adds.
As the IMI reported, in the fall of 2022, former TRC "Ukraina" journalist Angela Slobodyan told her story of being a captive in occupied Kherson. She spent about a month in a Kherson detention center which the Russians turned into a torture camp. She spoke about the invaders abusing their captives and torturing Ukrainian POWs.
A symbolic tribunal against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his entourage for the crime of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed since February 24, 2022, will take place in The Hague starting February 20.
On January 19, the European Parliament adopted a resolution in support of the action to create an international tribunal to bring to justice all those guilty of the crime of aggression against Ukraine, which was committed under the political and military leadership of the Russian Federation and its allies.
In September 2023 Angela Slobodyan released the documentary "Invasion", the videos for which she filmed while living in occupation.
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