A Ukrainian interpreter for the German TV channel ZDF was injured in the Russian shelling strike on Kharkiv on December 30. At the time of the explosion, the channel’s team was in the Kharkiv Palace Hotel, which was hit by a Russian missile.

According to the ZDF, the channel’s reporter Alica Jung, who was staying at the hotel, reported this.

She says that, at the moment of the attack, three employees of the channel were on the fifth floor, one was in the lobby, and another one was on the 11th floor. The interpreter was wounded in the hall: she broke a rib and three vertebrae. The journalist added that it was a miracle that everyone survived.

According to the hotel manager, a total of 15 rooms were given out, of which at least 10 were given to journalists.

The ZDF condemned the attack on the hotel where the journalists were staying. “This is another attack on the free press by Russia. We hope that our injured colleagues recover quickly. The ZDF will continue to report on the war against the Ukrainian civilian population,” ZDF Editor-in-Chief Bettina Schausten said.

According to the IMI representative in the Kharkiv oblast, the victim has broken ribs and has already been taken to Kyiv.

Svitlana Dolbysheva later reported that she had been discharged from the hospital on January 10 and was recovering at home. She was diagnosed with a concussion, an open wound in the head, a lung contusion and hematoma, and fractured ribs.

The interpreter says that the ZDF crew arrived at the Kharkiv Palace hotel a few hours before the attack. They were done with their work and were about to go out for dinner together. Svitlana was waiting for her colleagues in the lobby.

“The very layout of the hotel, in terms of architecture, seems particularly important to me now; I never thought about it that way before, but it’s an atrium with 11 floors. And had just taken the elevator down, gone to the main entrance, looked around to see if my colleagues were anywhere nearby. I realized that I had come first, so I sat down on a chair by the piano to wait for them. I opened TikTok and read two poems by Vasyl Symonenko. And I think all this, all those movements, took about one minute. Because I remember that when I went outside, I saw that it was 18:58. I only remember individual images after that. That entire atrium crumbling down. Next thing is the floor,” Svitlana Dolbysheva recalled.

After the impact, Svitlana managed to go down to the hotel’s underground parking lot and find her colleagues.

“For the first 15 minutes I just lay in the underground parking lot. Then the doctors came to me, who had, I don’t know, some kind of capsule tool kit, but they couldn’t do anything for me. They said they were just triaging patients, so they called an ambulance because I couldn’t move on my own. The pain was growing by the minute. And breathing was increasingly difficult. Later, I realized that the ambulance cars could not get through because of the debris scattered around the hotel. The first patients they took, the wounded, were those who could come out to them or who could be brought out to them. Our crew’s driver went outside time and again and tried to catch an ambulance and somehow coordinate it, lead it down to this underground parking lot, so that I could be taken away on a stretcher,” says Svitlana.

Next, Svitlana was taken to the Kharkiv Oblast Clinical Hospital for an initial examination, and then to Kyiv. On January 10, Svitlana was discharged from the hospital and is currently recovering at home. The interpreter says, “however my diagnosis may sound, for the doctors it is just a list of physical stuff, so to speak.” “None of this is a threat to my life, everything should heal normally, and I will carry on with my life,” she added.

“The hardest thing now is to see that the attacks on the hotels continue and all the destruction and damage the people in the Park Hotel suffered, which in some sense is even worse, because that building is small and the missile hit the roof directly. Watching these videos is just very painful, everything inside me shivers,” says Svitlana.