The filming crew of the French TV channel TMC witnessed a rocket attack during a live broadcast, report Télé-Loisirs and 24newsrecorder.
The channel’s journalist Paul Gasnier had come to Druzhkivka (Donetsk oblast) to cover the war in Ukraine. On the evening of January 2, a few minutes after going live, his crew was knocked off their feet by an explosion.
At the time, reporters Paul Gasnier, Héloïse Grégoire, and Théo Palfray were only a few meters away from the explosion, which went off right behind them near Kramatorsk (Donetsk oblast).
In the video, the journalist is facing the camera with a microphone in his hand, followed by a sound of a Russian bomb going off, throwing him forward, and the camera falling to the ground. Immediately after that, the transmission was interrupted and, as it later turned out, the journalist ran to a bomb shelter together with the sound engineer.
Gasnier later explained how it had happened in his comment on the program: “It caught us by surprise. We were close to the explosions, and we could always hear them, but nothing like this has ever happened to us.”
According to him, they were alone on the street, in the parking lot in front of their hotel.
“… it was very loud, we had dust in our eyes and mouth. Part of the hotel entrance collapsed on top of us, the windows were shattered. It was very thrilling. We don’t know what happened exactly, we were very scared. But now we are all safe, everything is fine,” the journalist said.
“I lost my microphone. Normally I should have had a red microphone, but I lost it in the explosion. Window shards were all around us, we were knocked off our feet, but we are fine,” Gasnier said.
The filming crew managed to get to safety. “We were able to take cover in a church a little further away in another neighborhood. We are inside, we are alright, that’s all that matters,” he said.