Speaking to The Front Page podcast, freelance war journalist Tom Mutch says he has faced many close calls over the last year that he has dedicated to telling the stories of brave Ukrainians on the frontlines, but one stands out.
“There was one occasion where we actually targeted specifically by Russian collaborators who genuinely wanted to kill us,” he says.
“We were in a small town called Soledar in the Donbas region, very near the city of Bakhmut, which is the epicentre of the fighting that is happening now.”
Mutch says he was there with a group of volunteers, mostly ex-British military, who were evacuating civilians from the town.
Many of the residents had lived in this town for most of their lives and it was incredibly difficult to convince them to leave.
“We were trying to evacuate this couple, a mother and her son. The son was very badly injured. He had an eye patch and his arm was in a sling. We had a medic with us who was examining his wounds, but he really didn’t want to leave. We eventually told him that if he didn’t come with us right now, he’d lose his eye and his arm and he’d probably die.”
They eventually convinced the couple to get into the car and they left the apartment block where they stayed – and it was at this point that things took an even darker turn.
“We drove to a meeting block about a 10-minute drive away to a park overlooking the apartment blocks where the family lived. About 10 minutes after being there, those apartment blocks were hit by a huge salvo of incendiary rockets.”
Mutch says it later occurred to the team that they had been identified by pro-Russian collaborators, who had given their co-ordinates to Russian artillery perched on the hills.
“If we had stayed there any longer... the place where we were [standing] was literally covered in explosives.”
Mutch grew up in Christchurch and attended Burnside High School before heading overseas to study modern history while at Oxford University.
He did an undergraduate degree in history at Oxford, where he developed an interest in writing and photography.
He has subsequently written for The Times and The Telegraph in the UK.
Listen to the full episode of The Front Page podcast to hear more from Mutch, who just recently returned to New Zealand after his 10-month stint in the war-torn country.
- The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.
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-By Damien Venuto
