On 22 July 2023, Deutsche Welle (DW) camera operator Yevhen Shilko was wounded while reporting from a Ukrainian army training ground near Druzhkivka, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. According to the German public broadcaster, Shilko was hit by shrapnel from a Russian cluster bomb fired at Ukrainian positions. The attack took place at around 12:10 local time, approximately 23 kilometers from the front line separating Ukrainian and Russian troops. One Ukrainian soldier was killed in the bombing and several others were seriously injured, the outlet reported. DW’s correspondent Mathias Bölinger, as well as the crew’s safety team, who were with Shilko at the time of the incident, were not wounded.
“We were filming the Ukrainian army during training, and suddenly we heard several explosions. We lay on the ground, there were several more explosions, we saw that there were [people] wounded. Later, the Ukrainian army confirmed that we were fired upon with cluster munitions,” Böhlinger said.