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Russia Today
5 days ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
WATCH Russian war correspondent dodge Ukrainian suicide drone
Russian war correspondent Andrey Filatov on Saturday published dramatic video footage of him narrowly dodging a Ukrainian first-person-view (FPV) suicide drone that exploded just a few meters away from the journalist. The day before, multiple Ukrainian outlets reported that he went missing on the front lines of the conflict. On Saturday, Filatov published a video that showed him riding a motorcycle while being pursued by a Ukrainian suicide drone. When warned of an incoming UAV, he turns the motorbike aside and ducks as it whirrs past and explodes just a few meters ahead of him. According to the journalist, he was checking a radio interference blind spot along a Russian logistics route, which was created when an electronic jammer post along it was moved. This made the area vulnerable to Ukrainian radio-controlled drones. Russian war correspondent and drone specialist Andrey Filatov survives an extremely close call in the Pokrovsk direction '[Ukrainian forces] began to see further, and the road ended up in radio shadow,' he wrote in a Telegram post on Saturday. He rode too far ahead of his companions, who had a jamming unit mounted on their car, and had to 'dodge' the drone, Filatov explained. The development of jamming technology has made radio-controlled drones far less effective and has increasingly forced both sides in the Ukraine conflict to use optic cable-controlled UAVs. These drones are slower, but are entirely immune to radio interference. The area where Filatov was attacked is situated along the Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsk) sector of the frontline, where Russian forces are advancing to encircle the major Ukrainian logistics hub city.
Yahoo
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood: The darkly comic despair of the foreign correspondent
This novel doesn't need the old-fashioned disclaimer that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, because plainly it isn't. Like her heroine, Sara Byrne, author Phoebe Greenwood was a freelance newspaper correspondent on the Middle East. Sara manages to find a job in Gaza and gets to stay at the one decent place, the Beach Hotel. It represents the Al Deira, destroyed by Israeli forces last year, to which the book is dedicated. 'Much like rich Turks, American network crews like nice hotels,' she writes. 'They like airy, sea-fronting suites and restaurants with uniformed waiters where they can eat French fries and safely watch the war raging in the street and skies outside on big TV screens.' That is what the novel, Greenwood's debut, mercilessly depicts — the world of the foreign correspondent. We meet the all-important fixers, the locals who make good money out of providing the hacks with contacts and interviews. Sara launches forays accompanied by fixer Nasser, who regards her with disdain and pity. But he does set up decent interviews, like one with the director of the emergency unit at the hospital who observes: 'I would like to ease their pain, but we're running out of anaesthetic and even basic painkillers.' No fiction there. After a bombing outside the hospital, Sara sees a body: 'It came out backwards, very close to my face, one flip-flop dangling from a dusty foot, skinny and bloody but intact. It was the face that was missing.' But she's under pressure to outperform the competition. And Sara's judgment isn't what it was once. She is also an unattractive character, physically and morally, even among a cohort of unattractive journalists. When she courts disaster and it engulfs others, she has nothing to offer. 'You come, you watch us die, you watch us grieve … you take our stories, you go home,' a bereaved mother tells her. This sobering, blackly humorous and acutely observed book is based on events more than a decade ago. The depressing thing is that nothing much has changed. Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The London Standard Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood is out now (Europa Editions, £16.99)
Al Jazeera
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Breaking down the drone ‘revolution' driven by Russia's war on Ukraine
Breaking down the drone 'revolution' driven by Russia's war on Ukraine NewsFeed Breaking down the drone 'revolution' driven by Russia's war on Ukraine Russia and Ukraine are waging a remotely controlled battle in the air and at sea that the world's militaries are closely watching for insights. Al Jazeera's Alex Gatopoulos explains.
Times
09-05-2025
- Times
Jon Sopel's wartime travails and keeping his marriage afloat
News organisations take great care before sending correspondents into a war, but this is a relatively new development. When working for the BBC, the journalist Jon Sopel was a young dad of two at the point he was suddenly told he was going to Afghanistan. He tells Travel Diaries that they didn't even give him time to get the advised three rabies jabs, and his route to the country was fatal for others. So, naturally, he had concerns, and it's hard to imagine these being dealt with now as they were then. When he told his boss that he would have to talk to his wife about the trip, Sopel's boss replied: 'Oh mate, you're only on your first marriage.' Sir Trevor McDonald knows Sopel's
