The chief editor, two reporters, and a camerawoman with Suspilne Donbas had to take cover from Russian drones in a residential building’s entrance hall while filming a news story in Druzhkivka (Donetsk oblast), chief editor Andriy Kramchenkov reports to the IMI representative in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.

Kramchenkov said the incident happened on 7 November, when the camera crew arrived in the city to film a story about the locals’ life.

“We talked to the locals, asked them if they had power supply, water, heating. The nearby buildings were damaged – a school, a kindergarten, high-rise buildings,” said Andriy Kramchenkov.

The filming crew heard buzzing and shots while broadcasting live, he added.

“I saw an aerodynamically designed UAV, so either a Gerbera or a Shahed, a triangular one, which [the military] were trying to shoot down. It fell down a couple of blocks away from us. The buzzing did not stop after this, the drones were flying one after another. They were aircraft-type drones, I can not identify them exactly. Maybe Molniyas. Maybe V2Us. They were trying to shoot them down,” said Kramchenkov.

The crew had to hide from the drone attack in the entrance hall of a residential building. When the drones’ buzzing died down, the crew sprinted to their car and drove off. Andriy Kramchenkov said that the crew’s car had been marked with a small PRESS inscription on the windshield, the entire team was wearing black body armor and helmets, some had appropriate stickers and individual first-aid kits, as required by battlefield reporting protocols. So the team could have been identified as a reporting crew through the drones’ cameras.

The Suspilne Donbas editor stressed that this was not the first time that a similar situation had occurred. A Russian drone previously tried to “hunt down” the news outlet’s filming crew in Rodynske (Donetsk oblast) on 25 May 2025. The journalists managed to take cover in an entrance hall as well.

Despite having relocated to Dnipro city, Suspilne Donbas continues to operate in the Ukraine-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. But, as Andriy Kramchenkov said, working is becoming increasingly dangerous even at a relative distance (Druzhkivka is 15–20 km away from various points of the front line) from the line of combat (referring to the Deep State map).

“So this is a distance that a striker drone covers easily,” the editor added.