It’s troubling because the Sky News attack and the Danish attack have the same profile. The Danes were covering a bombing in Okhtyrka that happened the day before, and there weren’t ground battles in the area.
Both were traveling in civilian cars. The Danish one was marked as press. I would be very surprised if a Sky News team didn’t have the same good sense.
I did get part of the story wrong though. They were told to turn off their phones once they were in the ambulance heading to the hospital. Here’s the story, it requires translation from Danish:
Sure, I’ve heard similar stories, and maybe that makes sense if you’re in a situation where your life is definitely at risk.
Roadblocks are a pretty unique problem in countries that aren’t used to following a lot of rules in general, and at least by 2010, when my friends were in Afghanistan - USMC in Helmand - soldiers were told to be aware of that, so if there is no response, then you would fire a warning round, and then if there’s still some kind of confusion, you would fire into the engine, to make it clear to people that they’re making a serious mistake, and possibly bring the car to a halt.
If that doesn’t help, then killing everyone in the vehicle becomes an option. Going there immediately in a situation where you aren’t in danger would be viewed as extremely unprofessional by the guys I know.
In the footage from the Sky News team, they can’t see the guys who are firing on them. They have no idea where it’s coming from. There’s no checkpoint. There’s an initial shot (which made me think “warning shot”) but they respond by stopping, so why keep shooting?
I’m not sure how close Ukraine is to Afghanistan or Iraq in those regards, but Ukrainians obliterating civilian cars inside their own country would be nothing short of insane. I can’t imagine being in a local militia and firing on civilian cars without being 110% sure. I’d rather risk it being full of spetsnaz.
