- Dead eye - 22nd January 2025
- Faulty delivery part two - 21st January 2025
- Building a case! - 20th January 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry has always tried to keep up with the latest trends, and today a new one is emerging – the use of cheap drones by Russia to target civilians, which changes EVERYTHING!
Some things are for the better, while some are for the worse, but you can rely on the fact that change happens, and you have to keep up to date with it.
A case in point is what is happening now in the war after Russia invaded Ukraine.
We have become used to the sight of drones in this war zone which has altered fighting forever, but now it seems they are being used by Russia to target innocent civilians, which, again, makes a big difference.
In the Kherson region there have been more than 1,000 drone strikes since last Summer, injuring over 500 people and killing 36, according to municipal authorities.
Surveillance drones patrol high up; smaller attack drones (known as FPVs, or first-person-view drones), with a flying time of 20-40 minutes, sit on rooftops to conserve battery power.
The munitions dropped are often makeshift: mortar shells, grenades, canisters containing shrapnel or darts, or bottles of petrol that ignite.
Shops, schools, clinics, private houses, delivery vans, buses, firetrucks and other first responders are routinely targeted.
Several administrative officials have been wounded. In one instance, declared Roman Mrochko, the head of the military authority in Kherson, a minibus “was almost completely destroyed, but the driver heroically saved the injured people by driving, you could say on scrap metal, to the hospital”.
In neighbourhoods where the attacks are concentrated (designated “red zones” by Russians on Telegram channels), life has been throttled.
There is no gas, water, electricity or municipal heat, and public transport is suspended.
Ambulances wait outside the area for police in armoured cars to ferry the wounded to them.
Yet this is not the only time that worrying new trends have developed, and journalists like me are targets too.
200 media organisations, and 100 journalists have fallen foul of the changing law in Russia, and that’s on top of human rights defenders, political opposition figures, artists, playwrights, religious leaders and LGBTQ activists.
According to the United Nations (UN) at least 1,372 people have been charged with politically-motivated crimes in closed trials.
The punishments now in Russia or Russian-controlled territory, can be draconian.
For example one alleged ‘criminal’ is a 68 year old paediatrician called Nadhezda Buyanova who faces 10 years in jail for allegedly making an anti-war remark to a soldier’s widow during her child’s check up.
But it is the crackdown on a free and independent media (which I think is EXTREMELY important in a society) that particularly worries me as a long-standing journalist.
The Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshyna died in Moscow’s Lefortvo jail (which is run by the Russian security agency FSB) in September.
Another journalist called Maria Ponomarenko along with many others has endured forced psychiatric detention.
Reporters like these appear to have got under the skin of the security services, and may know more than most how important it is to keep up with changing trends, and how Russia is now using new technology to target civilians…
The memories of Phil’s astounding, decades long award-winning career in journalism (during which he endeavoured to adapt to changing trends, and was lucky enough to work in a largely free environment) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – why the inauguration of Donald Trump calls into question legal rules, when he is the first elected President in modern times to be a convicted felon.
