The Russian drone strike in Dnipro overnight on 15 November damaged the building where the offices of the newspaper Visti Prydniprovya and the news website Novyny Pidhorodne are located. The blast wave broke the windows, damaged the frames, furniture, and some office equipment, reports Visti Prydniprovya.
Visti Prydniprovya chief editor Natalia Kovalchuk said that the strike occurred just a few days after the office renovations were completed: the team had created a modern media hub where journalists from relocated media outlets and other media professionals could come to work.
“We had just prepared the rooms for the editorial archives and equipped the working areas for journalists. We hadn’t even had time to set up the chairs — that’s when the attack happened,” the editor said.
She added that the team was assessing the scale of the damage and coordinating to resume work.
This information was confirmed to the Institute of Mass Information journalist by Oleksiy Kovalchuk, the founder of Visti Prydniprovya (which, in turn, founded Novyny Pidhorodne. – Ed.).
“We bounced back, as they say, the easy way. The windows in the room where they were replaced recently are still intact. A window was blasted out in the room where we were building the media hub. The problem is that these are large front windows. In another room, which we use for storage, the windows also shattered,” said Oleksiy Kovalchuk.
Previously
The Russian mass drone strike on Dnipro city late on 17 November damaged the building where the offices of the regional Suspilne branch and Ukrainske Radio are located. The strike resulted in a fire, blasted out out the windows and doors, damaged the building’s ceilings and the roof. IMI’s Mediabaza Dnipro, which was based in the Suspilne building, was also destroyed.
The strike in Dnipro also damaged a TV tower in the city.
Reporters Without Borders consider the Russian attack on Suspilne Dnipro and the TV tower a war crime.
The International Press Institute (IPI) also condemned the Russian attack on the offices of Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne in Dnipro on the night of November 17, saying it represented an escalation in the targeting of media infrastructure by Russian forces.