On 6 October 2023, a film crew with Portuguese public broadcaster RTP came under Russian fire while at their hotel in central Kharkiv, RTP and Ukrainian media reported. Russia’s combined missile attack that day killed at least two people and injured 30 more across the city, according to Ukrainian officials quoted by local media. Journalists Paulo Jerónimo and José Pinto Dias, as well as their Ukrainian producer Andriy Kovalenko were not injured. Their car, however, was severely damaged.
“At 6.50 in the morning I woke up to a very, very loud whistle-like sound”, Kovalenko told the Institute of Mass Information, a Ukrainian press freedom monitoring group. “I didn’t even feel the explosion at first, just the windows burst. I was crushed by the window frame. Dust, fire… I honestly thought I was going to burn, but my hands were under the blanket at that moment and this saved me. The fire was put out by the impact wave from the the explosion,” Kovalenko said.