11 March 2022 | CPJ
Camera operator killed in Mariupol
Crossfire
On March 11, 2022, Viktor Dedov, a senior camera operator at the Mariupol-based independent television station Sigma TV, was killed when a shell hit his apartment building in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. This was according to a Facebook post by his wife and colleague Natalia Dedova, and a statement by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU).
Dedov was at home in his apartment when he died, at at time when Russian forces were heavily shelling the city, according to news reports.
In a documentary film entitled “Mariupol. The Chronicles of Hell,” which premiered on YouTube on May 3, Dedova and Dedov’s son Sasha explained that a first shell hit the family’s balcony and a second one hit the room that Dedov was in.
Aina Chahyr, a former director of privately owned Mariupol TV channel TV-7, where Dedov worked before joining Sigma TV, told the NUJU that she had never met a better cameraman.
The NUJU reported on April 14 that Dedov and his wife, an editor for Sigma TV, kept on filming Mariupol and interviewing its residents “even during the active phase of the war, even when communications in Mariupol disappeared.”
Mariupol’s city council reported on March 11 that at least 1,582 civilians had been killed as a result of Russian shelling and a 12-day blockade, according to media reports. Mariupol faced continued attacks as of early May 2022, according to reports, with casualties in the tens of thousands.
Read the original article here: https://cpj.org/data/people/viktor-dedov/
