My-Ukraina (We Are Ukraine) TV host Oleh Biletskyi spoke to Polskie Radio for Ukraine about the Russian attack on the channel’s office building in Kyiv on September 8. He was in the office on the third floor at the moment of the drone strike, hosting a live radio broadcast, IMI reports.

The journalist said that the impact had been so sudden that he hadn’t realized the drone had hit the building itself at first, and continued with the stream.

“I was lucky, because if you look at the moment of the attack, the drone flew into one of the building’s façades, where the stairwell is. I was in a different part of the building and felt the impact. There was this moment where I was essentially lifted off the ground for a split second and then put back down. For the first few minutes I didn’t realize what had happened and kept going with the broadcast alongside a Ukrainian diplomat. I thought the strike had hit 50 to 100 meters away from us,” Biletskyi recalled.

Biletskyi said it was thanks to the room he had been working in having no windows that he had been spared from more serious injuries. Around five minutes after the blast, he noticed a distinctive smell of melting wires and smoke and asked his colleagues to cut to an ad break early.

“When I went out into the main hallway, I saw that the walls were essentially gone. I mean, you could just walk straight down to the street outside from the third floor. That’s when I realized the strike had hit right here,” the journalist recounts.

Making his way down the emergency stairs to the street, Oleh Biletskyi saw at least two injured colleagues being given first aid as everyone waited for ambulance crews to arrive.

The journalist added that there had been no way to prepare for a strike like this: it happened in complete silence, with no warning sound of a drone approaching or its engine buzzing. The situation was made harder still by the fact that air raid sirens had been sounding almost constantly in Kyiv lately.

At the same time, Biletskyi stressed that the team needed to keep working even during Russian attacks and that going forward he planned to host broadcasts from a bomb shelter.

“You can’t live in a basement — we have to work, earn a living, keep people informed. This was the first attack of this kind, where a drone struck a newsroom building directly rather than just blasting out windows [by exploding] nearby. It’s clear that the first thing my team will do is start broadcasting from a properly equipped shelter,” he said.

Despite the destruction, the newsroom continues working. Some broadcasts have temporarily switched to a remote format, and by the following day, streaming had resumed from an underground studio in a shelter.

Biletskyi said that the strike had attracted significant international attention, with journalists from other countries arriving to the site, including reporters with US-based media outlets, Al Jazeera, and a group of media professionals from Asia.

“The Russians have changed their tactics. At the start of the full-scale war in 2022, they were hitting technical broadcasting infrastructure — TV towers in Kyiv and Lviv. Now they’re targeting the people producing the information. But this isn’t just a story about sympathy for Ukrainian journalists. It’s a reminder of an alarming danger for the entire continent, one that needs to be addressed pre-emptively,” Oleh Biletskyi concluded.

Earlier, the Russian strike on the TV channel’s office was condemned by EU Ambassador to Ukraine Katarina Mathernova, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Jan Braathu, and RSF.

The attack occurred as the journalists were broadcasting live as part of the national telethon United News at the moment of the strike. The building was severely damaged and six employees of the TV channel were wounded.