Colin Freeman is former chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph and author of ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The mission to rescue the hostages the world forgot.’
When Hamas murdered 1,200 people on October 7, I was in eastern Ukraine, researching a long piece for the Telegraph on how the summer’s counter-offensive had gone. The death toll in Israel’s 9/11 was equivalent to just a week or two’s heavy fighting in the Donbas. Yet immediately it was clear that the massacre 3,000
Yair Mozes, whose mother and father are among the 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas, is trying to describe what it feels like. ‘It is hell,’ he says. ’You don’t go to sleep properly, then the minute you wake up, you’re bolt upright. I’m just about managing at present… then every now and then I fall
Journalists love being put on blacklists. In a profession that prides itself on holding the powerful to account, there’s no better accolade than being banned from a politician’s press conferences, put on some spin doctor’s dossier of ‘unfriendly’ hacks, or better still, declared persona non grata by some tyrant’s regime. It’s the hack’s equivalent of
At a small army field clinic outside Bakhmut, I watched as the body of a dead soldier was carried in. Two more soldiers followed, this time seriously injured – and this was what troops described as a ‘quiet day’. Ukraine doesn’t talk about its military deaths much and refuses to reveal any figures. There’s little
I can still remember the shock of watching the news on Sunday, 31 August 1997 and learning that Lady Diana had been in a car crash in Paris. The Beeb’s royal reporter, Nicholas Witchell, had just confirmed that she’d died, and that five French photographers who’d been chasing her had been arrested. My own feelings
Christopher Perryman, a former British soldier, did not enjoy life as a security guard protecting the HS2 line from eco-protestors. They called him a child molester and a bigot. So when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he decided to go there instead. ‘I hated HS2 – we were getting things thrown at us, and
Radio Four recently broadcast a ‘Best of’ edition of From Our Own Correspondent, marking 100 years since the birth of one of its most distinguished contributors, the late Charles Wheeler. Listening to the likes of Allan Little reporting on the fall of Mobutu, and Brian Barron in Vietnam, one is reminded that however tedious Thought
The first hint that my audience with Volodymyr Zelensky might not be what I’d hoped for came with the emailed invite. A few days before I’d been told I’d made the shortlist for a select presidential news conference marking the anniversary of the war. Not quite an exclusive interview, granted, but given current Zelenskymania, a
When Vladimir Putin’s troops first invaded Kherson, they marched into Eugene Chykysh’s hipster coffee shop. ‘They all asked for cappuccinos with four sugars,’ Eugene told me. Later, another Kherson resident says that the soldiers who raided his house took ten kilos of sugar from him. Eugene is one of the few Ukrainians in Kherson who
At his base near the frontlines outside of Kherson, an ex-British soldier named JK shows me a video of what looks like a scene from the world war one film 1917. It shows him and two other volunteer fighters walking through a burning, smoking treeline, having spent two hours pinned down by artillery and sniper fire
Bomb shelters have come a long way since the Blitz. As missiles from Azerbaijan rained down on Nagorno-Karabakh a few weeks ago, Hayk Harutyunyan and his family took refuge in a basement with wifi, an ensuite toilet and a makeshift mini-bar. There were 12 people crammed in there every night, he told me, ‘but we
While visiting a Ukrainian militia this summer, I nearly trod on an anti-tank mine which was being used as a doorstop at the entrance to their HQ. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a broken Russian one that we found,’ said my breezy host, Eduard Leonov. ‘We’re trying to fix it so we can use it.’ Eduard’s militia
‘That used to be my neighbour’s Skoda,’ says Alexei Marchenko, as he points to a twisted lump of metal in the wreckage of a row of garages. We’re standing in the courtyards of his housing estate in Kyiv, where a Russian missile landed overnight. One person has been killed and another dozen injured, although it’s a
Kyiv, Ukraine I’ve never commuted into a warzone by train before, but I can now recommend it. The express train to Kyiv from Lviv near Ukraine’s Polish border has several advantages over coming in by car. Firstly, it avoids a 14-hour motorway drive, where fuel is short and traffic jams are long. Plus, the online
Iran’s new meddler-in-chief in Iraq is a bespectacled general called Esmail Ghaani. Brought in to replace Qassem Soleimani after his death in a US airstrike in January, he has the same green uniform as his predecessor, the same grey beard, and the same orders to make Iraq’s Shia militias do Tehran’s bidding. That, though, is
In mid 2015, Macer Gifford, the City trader who went to Syria to fight Isis, got an unexpected phone call. He was in London for a break and busy doing media interviews as the unofficial spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia. The caller, though, wasn’t just another hack after a quote. Instead, it was a
On Tuesday this week border control cops stopped a van with a shipment of face masks coming through the Channel Tunnel. When they checked the masks they found almost £1 million worth of cocaine tucked in among them. It was a similar story a week earlier. A man called Benjamin Evans was pulled over by the
When Alpha Condé ‘Le Professeur’ became president of Guinea in 2010, he was hailed by Tony Blair as an ideal leader — the very model of what an African premier should be. Unlike previous rulers, Condé didn’t shoot his way to the top, but arrived armed with a law degree from the Sorbonne and Guinea’s
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Next week, the trade negotiations between the EU and the UK begin in earnest. But in the days ahead, the positions set out by both sides are so far apart that the negotiations can only be heading towards an almighty row. James Forsyth writes in this week’s issue that it’s better if they get this
It’s been only six weeks since the death of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, but already there are a number of local hardmen vying to take his place. Most notable are his sidekicks, the Kray twins of the Shia world: Qais al-Khazali and his brother Laith. Qais and Laith who? Unless you’ve scanned Washington’s latest
