Journalists are targets. Again.

On January 19, on Grushevskogo Street the confrontations between Berkut fighters and protesters started in the afternoon and lasted till late at night. Berkut was throwing gas grenades and flash bang grenades non-stop at protesters, and protesters were throwing pavement stones and Molotov cocktails at Berkut. A lot were injured on both sides, journalists included.

The ‘Spilno.tv’ reporter and camera operator Anatoliy was injured by a rubber bullet shot by police officers. They were intentionally targeting journalists with non-lethal weapons. According to Anatoliy, it was obvious the Berkut fighter was targeting him, as the journalists’ sector is known to everybody and as a rule it is not targeted either by shots or by flash bang grenades. When medics were treating him he told them he did not expect to be shot by police, and they confirmed that he was not the first journalist they treated tonight. 

Another camera operator of Spilno.tv, Yanek, was injured, too: his brow was cut by a chip from a flash bang grenade.

The editor of Nizhyn online media outlet ‘Uezdnye Novosti’ Igor Volosiankin was injured in the leg. He was seen being treated by medics on the live stream by Chernigiv freelance camera operator Sergiy Zosimenko. Volosiankin was first hit by a flash bang grenade and later injured in the leg. Now he is in a safe place. 

Another journalist injured by a flash bang grenade was Viacheslav Veremia, a correspondent of the section ‘Kyiv’ of the newspaper ‘Vesti’. It went off right under his feet. He reported by phone that a chip hit his left eye, and his left arm was injured. He was sent to the site under the editorial assignment to cover the events there. Currently he is in hospital. He was taken there in an ambulance together with another journalist – that woman was injured by grenade chips in the face. Two more journalists had head injuries caused by stones the police were throwing at protesters, Ukrainska Pravda reports.

Yevhen Feldman, a Russian news photographer of the newspaper ‘Novaia Gazeta’ (Russia) was injured by a flash bang grenade. According to his twitter message, he was standing with his camera in his hands not far from the police line, and he feels they shot at him deliberately. The grenade hit him in the nose, broke his gas mask and went off under his feet. He ended up with a bloodied nose. According to him, earlier a lot of grenades were thrown at the crowd of journalists.