Michelle Ross-Stanton has spent months investigating the March 14 attack on her husband, Pierre Zakrzewski, and his colleagues outside Kyiv.
“I made a decision not to inform his family,” she said, “because I used to be so sure he was going to indicate up. All of us knew he had nine lives.”
But Ross-Stanton wasn’t waiting for the subsequent message from Fox: A former journalist herself, she began making calls from her London home that night to friends, sources, distant connections — anyone who might know something about Pierre.
The following day she learned that Zakrzewski, 55, had been killed, together with a 24-year-old Ukrainian journalist on his team, Oleksandra Kuvshynova. That they had been within the Kyiv suburb of Horenka on a reporting trip when their vehicle was hit by an explosion. The third member of their reporting team, Benjamin Hall, then 39, was alive but suffering grave injuries that might cost him a foot, a watch and a part of his leg. Two Ukrainian soldiers they were traveling with were killed as well, The Washington Post has learned.
Seven months later, Ross-Stanton hasn’t stopped working the phones.
For war correspondents, the chance of death has long been accepted as a part of the job. Already, 15 journalists have been killed in Ukraine for the reason that war began in February, in response to the Committee to Protect Journalists. But as of November, Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova remain the one journalists working for a U.S. television network who’ve died on this conflict.
Ross-Stanton stays on a quest to know the murky circumstances of her husband’s death. Though she has pieced together among the story of how his team ventured out to the front lines of the fighting at a very dangerous time, she remains to be trying to find out whether anyone — beyond the military force that launched the attack — is chargeable for what happened, or for the chaotic aftermath.
One particular detail continues to bother her: The team of security consultants hired by Fox to work with its journalists in Ukraine was not traveling along with her husband and his team after they were attacked.
Her frustration with the dearth of knowledge is shared by the parents of Kuvshynova, a young arts maven and aspiring journalist who launched into conflict-zone reporting when her country was invaded. They said nobody from Fox called to inform them that their daughter had been attacked, and so they haven’t been given any more information within the months that followed about how she died. They first became aware of the incident after reading a social media post from a Ukrainian government official. “We weren’t kept within the loop in any respect. The communication was not sufficient,” said her father, Andrey Kuvshynov. “We learned about it from the web.”
A Fox News spokesperson said that senior leadership was in contact with each families and worked with a translator to speak with Kuvshynova’s parents.
In an announcement, the spokesperson added that Fox was completely devastated by their deaths. “Their extraordinary dedication to telling the stories of those impacted by the war in Ukraine placed a critical highlight on the atrocities unfolding there each day — we’re without end grateful for his or her commitment to journalism and their ultimate sacrifice. We did every little thing humanly possible within the aftermath of this unprecedented tragedy amid the chaos of a war zone.”
While she declined to debate the small print, Ross-Stanton said she remains to be in talks with Fox over a settlement that might provide compensation for Zakrzewski’s death. Meanwhile, with a notebook and calendar at her side, she has been constructing a chronology of her husband’s final days and hours.
“I would like the reality and I would like the entire truth and I would like to know exactly what happened,” Ross-Stanton said in the primary interview she has given about her husband’s death. “It’s not that I don’t trust Fox to offer me the best answers, but I don’t trust anybody to offer me the answers that I would like to listen to.”
Zakrzewski arrived in Ukraine in late January together with a crew of Fox News colleagues. After checking into the InterContinental Kyiv hotel — a preferred base camp for Western journalists — they set to work reporting on the growing threats of a Russian invasion.
A relentlessly upbeat presence with a shaggy push-broom mustache, Zakrzewski got here to this task with the next status than most camera operators. A repute for competence and command built over his many years of field experience had also positioned him to tackle among the traditional responsibilities of a producer. From his home base of London, he was regularly dispatched to danger zones in addition to for less perilous news stories across Europe, reminiscent of British royal functions — which his wife says he didn’t particularly enjoy covering. Even their vacations were globe-trotting adventures. Family videos show Zakrzewski — a French-Irish dual citizen called “The Mad Irishman” by some friends — zooming around on his motorcycle, chatting up the locals.
“He never unpacked,” Ross-Stanton said. “I learned not to purchase food for greater than two days at a time. For him, it was a way of life alternative.”
Of their first weeks, the Fox News team produced regular updates on the Russian threat, normally through the lens of Zakrzewski’s camera. Many were broadcast live from the hotel’s rooftop, though correspondents also went to the streets of Kyiv and other cities, talking to residents concerning the growing threats of war. In late January, Fox reported on a bunch of civilians training for combat; in February, it captured scenes of Ukrainian soldiers conducting live-fire training outside of Chernobyl and, later, teenagers lobbing grenades to arrange for guerrilla combat.
A lot of the Fox staff had worked together before. But that they had one recent member of the team: Oleksandra Kuvshynova, a festival organizer and publicist who viewed the possibility to work with Fox as a terrific opportunity to interrupt into journalism. Starting in mid-January, she began helping the Fox crew coordinate and translate interviews and find their way across the region. She bonded along with her recent colleagues over their shared love of coffee and her passion for music.
“We were very pleased with her and knew it was essential work to do when the war began,” her father said, speaking for himself and her mother, Iryna Mamaysur. When her parents fretted about her safety, “she tried to calm us down and told us that Fox News was reliable, and so they had all security measures in place.”
In recent times, Fox News has cemented its rankings dominance with a give attention to hot-button conservative punditry, and its newsgathering presence in Ukraine was smaller than a few of its competitors’ — about 20 people through the conflict’s early weeks, while CNN had 75 in the beginning of the invasion.
But “Fox threw every little thing at Ukraine,” Ross-Stanton said. “They did throw quite a lot of resources at it. Everybody was over there.”
The Kyiv bureau’s first on-camera brush with danger occurred on Feb. 19, when correspondent Trey Yingst traveled to Ukraine’s eastern border and broadcast footage of troops preparing for the invasion. As Yingst interviewed the country’s interior minister, Russian-backed separatists began artillery strikes. The correspondent made a run for it on live television. As Zakrzewski’s jostling camera tried to maintain up, Yingst may very well be heard yelling, “Where’s Pierre? Where’s Pierre?”
On Feb. 24, Russia began its assault on Ukraine. Hall, who primarily covered the State Department from Washington, moved from the relative safety of the western city of Lviv to hitch the Kyiv staff. On March 11, the British-born correspondent reported on air that Russian troops were poised to invade the capital. Fox aired a segment filmed at a children’s hospital in Kyiv — the voices of young patients raised in song, the half-covered body of a dead boy lying on the ground. Air raid sirens may very well be heard in the gap.
“Thanks, Benji,” anchor John Roberts said on the conclusion of the report. “Stay protected.”
Because the Russians advanced across Ukraine that month, journalists became captivated by one evacuation route: the bridge across the Irpin River that separated Kyiv from the vulnerable western suburb of Irpin. Ukrainian forces had destroyed the bridge to maintain Russian tanks from rolling into the capital from the west, but now panicked suburbanites were struggling across picket planks laid on top of the water to flee the shelling — a dramatic scene highlighted in lots of news stories.
Then, on March 13, an American documentary filmmaker was shot and killed while passing through a military checkpoint on the western side of the river. Brent Renaud, 50, had been working on a project about war refugees for Time Studios. Zakrzewski witnessed the shooting from a ways away, in response to his wife.
Renaud’s death shocked the Kyiv-based press corps. It also jumbled their logistics: The mayor of Irpin called for journalists to remain away, and a predominant highway was closed off, forcing those that desired to travel to the front to take a more indirect route.
The following day, March 14, Zakrzewski headed back into the western suburbs with Hall and Kuvshynova.
From the moment she learned her husband was missing, Ross-Stanton went her own way.
That night, she began reaching out to her husband’s colleagues, to an array of contacts from her own profession as a videographer for the BBC and advocacy organizations. “Each journalist that I knew on the bottom, I contacted them to say, ‘Help, find my husband.’ ”
Later, after she got the decision that Zakrzewski was dead, Ross-Stanton insisted on flying to Krakow, Poland, then traveling to the Ukrainian border to retrieve his body. Fox News paid for the private plane and later for the funeral in Ireland, but she rebuffed suggestions that its executives accompany her or make the trip for her.
“I used to be very rude to the CEO of Fox News,” she said, adding that she later apologized. “I said, ‘No, I’m going. He’s my husband, and I’m going to get him.’ … I used to be prepared to go to Kyiv if I needed to and drag him out of the morgue if I needed to.”
After which she got down to learn exactly how her husband died.
Hall, the lone survivor of the attack, remains to be recovering from devastating injuries. He has not publicly described what happened, and Fox News didn’t make him available for an interview.
But from conversations along with her husband’s co-workers and other sources with firsthand knowledge, Ross-Stanton has re-created most of his final day.
She believes Zakrzewski, Hall and Kuvshynova left Kyiv around midday with the plan of filming soldiers digging trenches to mount a defense of the capital. When military officials waved them away, they detoured to a village that had recently been shelled. The team probably ended up within the village of Horenka by the use of a road that looped the good distance across the off-limits town of Irpin.
The Fox News team didn’t travel alone. Two soldiers from a Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion, gave them a ride from a gathering point within the western suburbs, said the group’s co-founder and top commander, Col. Andriy Biletsky. The group was formed in 2014, and its far-right views made its members controversial figures early within the war, though they might later be hailed as heroes for their long, doomed defense of Mariupol.
Zakrzewski felt confident of their safety, his wife says, because a team of Recent York Times journalists had made the identical trip with the identical soldiers someday earlier. But “there was quite a lot of shelling,” said Andriy Dubchak, a Ukrainian reporter who worked with the Times on that task. “Nobody knew where the front line was. It was really unpredictable.”
Sviatoslav Yurash, a detailed friend of Kuvshynova who serves within the Ukrainian parliament, said military investigators told him that they consider the Fox crew was filming after they spotted Russian forces and tried to search out a safer location — only to find yourself in the trail of artillery fire, possibly launched from the nearby Russian-controlled town of Hostomel. From her own reporting, Ross-Stanton believes the assault happened after they were stopped at a checkpoint as a substitute.
The barrage was intense — probably about 40 rockets, in response to Biletsky, the Azov commander. When Yurash visited the scene later with Kuvshynova’s father, they found utter devastation, with houses and vehicles decimated by shelling.
Still, the shelling was “very imprecise,” Biletsky said: That the Fox team’s vehicle happened to be where the rockets landed was “fantastically poor luck.”
In accordance with video from the scene viewed by Ross-Stanton, the primary shell landed about 20 feet in front of their vehicle. She says she could hear her husband shouting “Reverse! Reverse!” and “Get out!” Kuvshynova was trapped within the vehicle, Ross-Stanton learned from two individuals with close knowledge of the incident, while Hall and Zakrzewski escaped or were thrown from the vehicle. She believes that a shell sprayed the shrapnel that pierced her husband’s femoral artery just under his flak jacket. Each Azov soldiers were killed, Biletsky said.
Back in Kyiv, though, all anyone knew that afternoon was that the Fox team was missing.
As word began to spread, security consultants employed by Western media organizations huddled on the InterContinental Kyiv, conferring in hushed tones about how they might help. Kuvshynova’s parents — who only knew she had headed out on a reporting trip that day — grew concerned when she stopped responding to messages.
Dubchak, the Ukrainian stringer for the Recent York Times, spent hours that evening accompanying two security consultants — one with the Times, the opposite with Fox — on a search of area hospitals. They eventually positioned Hall in a single hospital, where he had been transported by soldiers who found him on the blast scene. Jennifer Griffin, Fox’s national security correspondent who had been assisting the search from Washington, scrambled to assist coordinate Hall’s evacuation via ambulance to the Polish border, then to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
But Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova remained missing. With nightfall and continued shelling in the world, Dubchak advised them to suspend the search until the morning.
Back in the USA that very same day, Fox News anchor John Roberts delivered the news that Hall had been injured, giving few details and saying nothing about his colleagues.
The next day, roughly 20 hours after Zakrzewski was known to be missing, the 2 security consultants working for Fox found his body in a morgue.
There was a direct outpouring of grief when Fox News reported the death of the widely beloved cameraman. As word began to flow into in Kyiv that Kuvshynova also had died, some journalists chided Fox on Twitter for not promptly reporting this news.
The truth is, the network was waiting out of deference to her family, who had known so little concerning the work she was doing, or the danger it involved, that they couldn’t comprehend why they were asked — the day after the attack — to come back to the InterContinental Kyiv to gather her belongings. Once they weren’t given an evidence for the trip, they decided to not go. Yurash, who had once worked as a neighborhood producer for Fox, tried to persuade them that she had been killed. Nevertheless it wasn’t until yet one more day passed, her father said, that a coroner at a neighborhood morgue confirmed her death for them.
Eventually, Ross-Stanton would come to know one reason for each the confusion of that day and the shortage of knowledge she could obtain: Aside from their militia escorts, the Fox News crew was alone on the market in Horenka.
“Why did they find yourself there?” asked Kuvshynova’s father in an anguished interview he gave to Insider.com a month after her death.
Now, Kuvshynov says: “It was the mistaken decision to send them on that specific task and to that location, because they knew it was extremely dangerous.”
Some journalists — including a number of Fox colleagues — felt the identical way initially, noting the death of Renaud in the world a day earlier.
But ultimately, a lot of the foreign correspondents interviewed by The Post — a close-knit community still grappling with the deaths of their friends — decided that the Fox News team had simply gone where the story was that day. The Post spoke with greater than 10 correspondents from quite a lot of news organizations; many said that they might have taken the identical trip and that the Fox crew had merely accepted the usual degree of reasonable risk that comes with their line of labor. Ross-Stanton agrees: “They didn’t consider it a dangerous mission,” she said.
“He was a person with great bravery, but I’ve definitely been with him when he said, ‘Well, I’m not doing that one.’”
— Stuart Ramsay
Many journalists expressed confidence in Zakrzewski’s instincts and caution, his habit of conducting what his wife called “dynamic risk assessments” with every task.
“He was a person with great bravery, but I’ve definitely been with him when he said, ‘Well, I’m not doing that one,’ ” said Stuart Ramsay of Britain’s Sky News, a friend of a few years.
Several Kyiv-based correspondents said Renaud’s death factored into their very own decision-making but didn’t keep them from leaving their hotels. “Our management back at home in London, they don’t say, ‘You’re not going out today because this has happened,’ ” said Jeremy Bowen, a veteran BBC correspondent.
A representative for Fox News said network officials discussed safety and caution with its team in Kyiv on daily basis. Renaud’s death “was a part of that discussion, and we were at all times urging caution,” the person said.
The truth of television journalism is that reporters need visuals to inform a story — and venturing into the world to gather footage produces a more compelling package than a stand-up broadcast from a hotel rooftop in Kyiv. “Your networks are at all times glad to take footage, until something goes mistaken,” said a former Fox News foreign correspondent, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships.
But some questioned whether the Fox team must have traveled with the militia.
“There isn’t any security role that lets you travel with soldiers within the front line under fire,” said Anton Skyba, a veteran local producer in Ukraine who now works for Canada’s Globe and Mail.
“For those who are with the Ukrainian military anywhere, you’re at the chance of being hit by shell fire, since it’s an artillery war,” said Richard Spencer, a correspondent for the Times of London, who had attempted a visit to Horenka a number of days before the Fox team.
Nevertheless it’s commonplace for media organizations to “embed” with a military unit in an energetic war zone. Several correspondents said it was often the one way for journalists to cover the Ukrainian front lines.
Dubchak didn’t think twice about embedding with the Azov soldiers the day before the Fox team went out. “They know the locations. They know the world,” he said. “And so they have a gun to guard us if something happens.”
Within the months since her husband’s death, Ross-Stanton’s investigation has focused heavily on the query of whom his team did not travel with in its final hour — anyone from the team of security consultants hired by Fox to supply logistical support and guidance.
In conflict zones, security consultants often function battlefield medics and extraction experts, marshaling resources to evacuate injured journalists. Most major news organizations operating in Ukraine have hired in-house security consultants or work with contractors.
Fox News has long contracted a security firm called Separ International, a small company that conducts hostile-environment-awareness training for quite a lot of media organizations.
“Standard operating procedure is for security to go along with them. Why didn’t they?”
— Michelle Ross-Stanton
Fox acknowledged in an announcement to Insider.com within the spring that the journalists separated from the safety team: “Our security team knew exactly where they were. We knew where we dropped them off, where they were going, and where they ended up.”
Ross-Stanton was baffled by this account — noting that team was missing for several hours. “They’ve said that they knew exactly where they were all the time, and that’s not true,” she countered.
“Standard operating procedure is for security to go along with them,” she said. “Why didn’t they?”
From her sources, she learned that the consultants stayed behind after dropping them off with the soldiers because there wasn’t enough room within the Azov vehicle. She argues, though, that in situations like that, security consultants typically travel behind in a separate vehicle — a position from which they might need been in a position to help after the Fox automobile was struck.
“What runs through my head each night is: What if?” she said. “If [the consultants] had been there, would they’ve been able to avoid wasting Pierre? Because all he needed was pressure on his wound to stop the bleeding. That’s all he needed.”
Reached by phone, Separ International chief executive Stephen Smith said he couldn’t discuss the attack due to sensitivity of the matter and out of respect to the families of those killed. A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment on Separ’s actions on the day of the attack.
However the journalist who took the identical trip a day earlier offers a possible explanation:
When Dubchak and his Times colleagues approached a checkpoint near Horenka with their Azov escorts, the guards would allow only one among their two cars to pass, citing safety concerns. Two vehicles, they explained, would offer the Russians an even bigger goal than one.
Assuming the Fox team faced the identical obstacle, the choice whether to travel on without security — on what was purported to be a fast trip, to a destination lower than a mile from where their security detail would reunite with them — would have probably been made between the journalists and the Separ team.
“I might like to know who made that call for them to not go,” Ross-Stanton said. “In some ways I type of hope it was Pierre that told them not to come back since it was too dangerous, because then I’m not going accountable anybody for his death.”
Every war correspondent finds a technique to come to terms with the risks. A few of Zakrzewski’s friends at the moment are reevaluating them.
“You tell yourself that you just might be okay because you’re very cautious,” said Clarissa Ward, a longtime foreign correspondent now with CNN. “But the fact is that there’s a component of luck and randomness to all of it, and Pierre’s death really rammed that home for me.”
Sky News’s Ramsay — who survived an explosion in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017 and was shot within the lower back near Kyiv in late February — teared up as he recalled the emotional last hug he shared with Zakrzewski before he left Ukraine to get well from his injuries: “My last words to him were, ‘Please take care. It’s really dangerous.’ ”
Now, Ramsay said, he finds himself wondering: “Is it possible to do that job without it being incredibly dangerous? If it’s not incredibly dangerous, you’re probably not doing it.”
“Pierre was unlucky,” said Nabih Bulos, a Los Angeles Times correspondent who has reported extensively on Ukraine. “They might say the identical thing about me sooner or later.”
On a recent afternoon, Ross-Stanton sat within the lounge of the small flat she shared along with her husband in southeast London, a spot full of relics of overseas assignments: his passports, a gas mask, his famously large collection of fanny packs.
There have been condolence letters from President Biden and Mick Jagger, and a note she had once scrawled for him in marker on the back of an envelope: “Put yourself first. It’s only TV — not life and death!”
Zakrzewski “would have loved to have been a father,” his wife says, but she apprehensive about raising a baby while he was off working in dangerous places.
“Our plan was for Pierre to retire early, and we were going to go off on our boat and have a dog, a water dog,” she said. “We just had so many plans.”
Now the old Dutch barge that he spent infinite hours repairing — his “expensive mistress,” Ross-Stanton jokes — stays docked in western London, its hull featuring a recent portrait of Zakrzewski and his family’s recent mantra: #BeMoreLikePierre.
Ross-Stanton doesn’t like being alone within the flat anymore. She’s eager about moving.
In an appearance at a Fox News staff meeting in September, Hall spoke up for the work that had cost his team a lot. “When we predict back to each Pierre and [Oleksandra], we now have to recollect what we are able to learn from them,” he said. “That what we do, that this job is so essential that we now have to maintain doing it. We now have to maintain doing it of their names.”
The truth is, the fallout from their deaths has been bitter. Lawyers for Kuvshynova’s parents said they sent questions for Fox to ask Hall about her work task and the circumstances of the attack — details they sought to assist prosecute Russia for a war crime. “They weren’t helpful in any respect,” the lawyer, Olga Grygorovska, told The Post. “After we had a chat with two of their lawyers, they simply ignored our requests.”
Ross-Stanton said pointedly of her still-unresolved settlement talks with Fox: “Pierre thought that I could be taken care of if anything happened to him,” adding that he joined the network as a full-time staffer to ensure a “level of protection” for her.
Yet she agreed with Hall that conflict-zone reporting is well worth the risks.
“Pierre desired to tell the reality,” she said. “He desired to be the voice for individuals who didn’t have a voice. … This was exactly what he desired to be doing.”
She continued: “I get offended when people say they don’t watch the news since it’s too depressing. And I explain that folks risk their lives to bring you that news in order that what’s occurring on the planet, and try to be watching it.”
She remains to be making calls, tracking down sources, trying to search out answers. She has taken a task as a key witness in a war-crimes tribunal investigation launched by France in March and hopes the findings will yield recent details — though, she said, “I don’t know if we’ll ever actually discover the reality.” She can be raising money for medical aid to Ukraine and plans to determine awards through the Frontline Club, an expert organization supporting freelance journalists, to honor each her husband and Kuvshynova.
“I’m dedicating myself to keeping his legacy alive,” she said. “That’s my job. That’s what’s keeping me going.”
