At the moment of the January 10 Russian shelling strike on the Park Hotel in Kharkiv, journalists for the TV channel France 2 were present in the building. The channel’s Ukrainian fixer Violetta Pedorych was injured, Ukrinform reports.

The journalists were checking into the hotel and were in the hallway at the time of the strike. Although they remained unharmed, one of the members of the group, Violetta Pedorych, was injured: the galss shards cut her face and hand.

Violetta provided Ukrinform with a video she filmed immediately after the attack.

As Violetta told the IMI, she is feeling well overall, but has a glass shard stuck in her node bridge. The doctors will observe it for some time. “If everything heals and causes no trouble, they will leave it there. If the inflammation doesn’t go away, they will try to look for it, they may have to cut out some tissue,” she added. Violetta agrees that the occupiers are targeting hotels where journalists stay.

According to her, the crew, which besides her included journalist Anaïs Hanquet and camerawoman Valérie Lucas, was returning from Pokrovsk (Donetsk oblast) that day. They were on their way to Sumy, but since they were a little behind their schedule, they stopped for the night in Kharkiv. They have stayed at the Park Hotel several times before, so they went there on January 10 as well, as the hotel had vacant rooms.

“We arrived at approximately 10:20 p.m. I don’t remember the exact time. We check in. We head to the elevator. Apparently, as we were in the elevator, there was an air raid alert that we did not hear. We come out on the third floor. Journalists were supposed to stay in one part of the hotel and I in another one. I already knew where my room was, but they were still looking for theirs,” says Violetta.

According to her, she had enough time to enter the room and turn on the light. Then the first missile hit. Violetta says she immediately realised what was happening. She went out into the corridor with a flashlight, there she heard the voices of her colleagues. Then there was a second impact.

As the fixer notes, her colleagues were still in the corridor during the first blow, so they were unharmed. She, however, had already got to her room, and although she was far from the window, she was cut by glass shards.

“There was a lot of blood flowing down my face. But I could feel that I was okay. I mean that there was nothing to worry about,” notes Violetta Pedorych.

Despite the panic, which was natural in that situation, Violetta and her colleagues found a way to go down to the first floor, and then got outside through a window.

The doctors who examined the media worker on the spot offered to hospitalize her, but she refused. Then she and her colleagues went to the subway, as the editorial management instructed them to protect their employees from further possible danger.

She added that their driver had friends in Kharkiv so he went to spend the night with them, which was why the team’s car survived, unlike the car of the Turkish news agency Anadolu and multiple other cars parked next to the hotel.

“Speaking of Park Hotel, we did always meet crews from French ir American TV channels whenever we arrived. It was a well-known hotel among journalists. Representatives of international organizations also used to stay there,” added Violetta.