The Dnipro-based radio station Europe Plus Dnipro temporarily went off air after a Russian strike in the city on 15 April, the station’s director Yulia Lavrynets reported to Kateryna Lutsiuk, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
Lavrynets said that a Shahed drone had hit the building where the radio station’s office is located, causing them to stop their broadcasting for half a day.
“The studio is located in a different wing of the building. But because of the fire and the smoke, the power supply to the entire block was cut off. For about half a day, people were not allowed into the building due to the heavy smoke. After they started letting people in, I went to the studio and saw that everything was more or less fine. No one was injured, and the equipment was intact,” Yulia Lavrynets said.
Olena Demchenko, the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting representative in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, said there had been fears that the radio station would not be able to resume broadcasting due to damage to the studio and equipment.
“When [the broadcaster’s staff] got there, they saw that several windows in the office had been damaged and the doors had been blasted out. It was hard to assess the state of the equipment that was in the room: visually it was intact, but a fire had been extinguished there, and the rooms were full of smoke. They could not check it right away due to the blackout in the building,” said Demchenko.
The radio station managed to resume broadcasting about half a day later. According to Yulia Lavrynets, one window and door were damaged in the room of the radio station itself.
“One window and door are damaged, if we are talking about our radio station’s premises specifically. If we are talking about the building in general, then one wing of it was badly damaged, all five stories,” said Yulia Lavrynets.
IMI carries out the only press freedom monitoring study in Ukraine and tracks Russia’s media crimes in the war against Ukraine.