Shortly before the broadcast, journalists in Ukraine were surprised by a large explosion behind them. Nobody was hurt, but the series is impressive.
A bombardment just a few tens of meters away from the Quotidien journalist team. This Monday evening, January 2nd, as Paul Gasnier, Héloïse Grégoire and Théo Palfray were preparing to go on the air, they experienced an explosion very close to their base in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.
The images were broadcast on the show and surprised the entire team on site and guest Bruno Le Maire. “I hadn’t seen the picture,” Yann Barthès comments, visibly surprised by the sequence. Immediately afterwards he picks up news in the duplex with Paul Gasnier. “How did you experience that, do you know if there are victims?” asks Yann Barthès.
Refugees in a Church
“We don’t know if there are victims, anyway we were the only ones outside, we were in the parking lot in front of our hotel, we were there for an hour, we were ready for the duplex. We don’t even know where exactly it fell, we only know that it was very loud, we had dust in our eyes and mouth. (…) we were very scared,” says Paul Gasnier, who specifies that his hands are still “a bit shaky”.
After the blast, the team fled elsewhere than the hotel, visibly affected by the blast. “We followed the journalists who fled a little further to a church in another district of Kramatorsk, so here I am on the premises of a religious community.”