Louise Bernard, edited by Solène Delinger
At the end of a fact-finding mission carried out in Ukraine from May 24 to June 3, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) publishes a report which brings together information and material evidence attesting that the photoreporter Maks Levin and his companion were coldly executed by Russian soldiers on March 13. The NGO is now looking for the identity of the murderers.
The NGO Reporters Without Borders collected “information and material evidence”. She publishes a report which shows that the photojournalist Maks Levin and his companion Oleksiy Chernyshov were “coldly executed and perhaps previously interrogated, even tortured” by Russian soldiers. It was mid-March. The reporter goes with his guide to a forest, about twenty kilometers from kyiv. He had lost his drone a few days earlier, which he had used to film and document this war. He clung to the images it contained. But the forest had since been partly occupied by the Russians. He was therefore never able to recover his equipment and lost his life there.
If RSF investigated, it was already to help the Ukrainian investigators, who are overwhelmed. The day the journalist’s body arrived at the morgue, there were a hundred with him. The crime scene could therefore not be fully analyzed. Only a few photos were taken. So RSF sent renowned photojournalist Patrick Chauvel and an investigator from the NGO, Arnaud Froger. They took photos on the spot and found three bullets, including one that was buried in the ground, at the exact spot where the journalist’s body was found.
Fight against impunity for perpetrators of crimes against journalists
Evidence forwarded to Ukrainian authorities. Beyond the need to help the police, to move the investigation forward, there is also a message behind RSF. “When a journalist is killed, there is not nothing that happens, on the contrary”, explains Arnaud Froger on Europe 1. way to fight against a form of impunity from which perpetrators of crimes against journalists benefit”.
So there remains a central question: that of the precise identity of the Russian soldiers. This is the next step. “Today, we have reduced the search to several units. But we are talking about tens of thousands of men. We will have to reduce this search and find the precise identity of the attackers. We have found elements that belonged to the units Russians and who show DNA traces. There are other avenues that we will explore to find out who executed this journalist because this is the major issue of this investigation”.