Gauthier Delomez
modified to
07:22, February 24, 2023
He is at the forefront of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In recent days, for the third time since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the editor-in-chief of Europe 1 Nicolas Tonev has been special envoy near the front to produce a series of reports. In an interview with Lénaïg Monier in Europe 1 Midi Weekend, he returns to the need to send a reporter on the spot, and not to content himself with taking up the available information. “The interest is to have your own look, your own verification of what is happening,” says the specialist in Russia.
According to him, it is not always about misinformation that may exist. “It can be approximations because a lot of information comes back from various people, through various means,” he says on Europe 1.
The emotional factor of war
Nicolas Tonev highlights the emotional factor of the conflict, which can lead to this vagueness. “As we are very emotional, in a war, we may have been afraid, have been stressed or have seen the dead”, explains the reporter for Europe 1, as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict begins a second year this Friday. “The person reporting something can quite easily let go and be imprecise. The point of being there, despite the difficulties, is precisely to come with his rigor, his conciseness, and to bring back the facts, to tell them as close as possible to what happened.”
The one who, among other things, made the documentaries Putin’s Hidden Fortune (2014) and Putin the Godfather (2018), is confronted “almost all the time” with this type of situation. “For example, if we take an area where there may have been an explosion or damage, we quickly meet very moved people”, describes Nicolas Tonev still with Lénaïg Monier. “Where did the damage come from? What exactly happened? People, still emotional, find it difficult to tell” precisely, he adds.
In these cases, the reporter “asks questions to different people and cross-checks all this information” to succeed in sharing facts that are closer to reality. In a context where the verification of information has taken a central place in the treatment of the war in Ukraine.