RÉCIT – We are the first journalists to accompany, on the Bakhmut front, Russian soldiers who had defected to fight with the Ukrainians. An international scoop obtained by teamwork, a little luck and a lot of bluff.
“Who do you think you are? You are not CNN.” Bakhmout, January 2023. The press officer on the line has just hung up on us. There’s nothing worse than working in the field when the big American media are around. Because they enjoy budgets ten times greater than others, their newspapers, magazines and television stations explode the budgets of fixers and interpreters, in addition to having priority over access for which journalists are scrambling. Especially in Ukraine. The day before, I met an old acquaintance in the parking lot of a shabby hotel in Druzhkivka, a photographer for the New York Times. My smile had tightened. His too. She, like me, asked ourselves the same question: were we there for the same story? It was, but we didn’t know it yet.
The subject in question? Svoboda Rossii, a unit created in April 2022 by Russian soldiers who defected to take up arms against…
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/2026/06/12/6a2bf4e1c1df0409196392.png "Ukraine strikes Tatarstan, in central Russia, 1,600 km from its border")