Journalist Claudio Locatelli injured in Kherson: “They don’t want us to tell the truth”

Italian independent journalist Claudio Locatelli was injured while working in Kherson yesterday, Monday, December 19th. The attack was documented in a video posted on their Facebook page.”Claudio Locatelli – The Fighting Journalist”🇧🇷 According to the reporter, it would have been a actual deliberate attack on crew car🇧🇷 “A car – declared a fanpage.it – highly identifiable. There is no doubt that it is a press, it is properly signposted”.

Locatelli and his team were driving across the underground bridge near the village of Antonivka, located very close to the river. “A very visible road – continued the journalist -. The roads that go towards the river are extremely visible from the Russian bank, so the car was perfectly identifiable. Shortly after we turned to reach the Antonivska cemetery and as soon as we stopped, they started to shoot. It went well for us, because if I had opened the car door I would have lost a leg or worse. From experience I can say that we got away with it”.

“We have already reached situations where we risk our lives, but they were all war situations. We never had the feeling that there was a desire to attack the press, although in recent days there have been some episodes that have left us believing that we were being targeted, we thought it was a coincidence, but this time there is a lot of evidence to support the thesis of intentional attack”.

This never happened before?

No, this has never happened to us, this must be said for the sake of accuracy. We never had the slightest idea that there might be a will to deliberately attack the press. Yesterday we were at the site to analyze its geography and positions, we are doing a structural analysis of the air. They deliberately hit us, because when we fled and tried to hide in a concrete area, the military continued to fire and the Ukrainian artillery began to fire back. If we had gotten out of the car, they would have killed us.

Why did they decide to attack him in the first place?

In the specific case of Kherson, I think the objective is to keep an eye on the citizens who live along the river. Families living there are often mixed: there are Ukrainians and Russians. For example, we spoke with a Russian girl who told us that she was insulted several times by the Moscow armed forces when they occupied the area. The intention is certainly not to be told, even if we don’t know exactly what. Surely they don’t want to hear that Kherson isn’t all rosy as they claim. To be precise, it must be said that it is not the other way around, we spoke with people who said they were quite calm in the presence of Russians. Hence to say that it is paradise as Russia would have you believe, of course it does.

How are you now?

I was slightly injured, I lost blood, but luckily I managed. If I had opened the door or got out of the car it would have been much worse. There is no excuse for press shootings, we will continue to monitor and report this conflict as usual.