On 28 September 2026, RFE/RL war reporter Maryan Kushnir came under a Russian drone strike while working in Kyiv.
Kushnir had been returning to the newsroom after filming the aftermath of a Russian attack on the National Academy of Sciences building. As he was passing near a private hospital, he heard a drone descending and managed to take cover in a depression in the ground, covering his head with his hands, before the drone exploded nearby.
“The explosion was essentially in my face,” Kushnir said. He added that he had seen the drone moving towards the city centre shortly before the strike and later began filming the aftermath, as debris was scattered across streets in central Kyiv.
After the explosion, Kushnir ran towards the site of the strike, but people had already begun evacuating from the hospital building. He was not injured.
Kushnir said that if he had tried to run for cover near a bus stop, he would not have had time to survive the strike, as he had less than two seconds before the explosion and there were no bomb shelters nearby in central Kyiv.