In Warsaw today they say goodbye to our colleague Oksana Baulina. What do we know about her death

Journalist Oksana Baulin was killed on March 23 in Kyiv during the filming. "Mediazona" tells everything that is known for today about the Ukrainian business trip of Oksana and the circumstances of her death.

“When her things were brought, I brought a bag, looked, there are some documents, a computer, three phones lie on top, everyone said like the police. Everything seems to be in place. And then one phone begins to play, someone calls her. I take him in my hands, and the phone is all in dried blood, ”the journalist Anton Naumluk tells how he brought things in Kyiv by colleagues Oksana Baulina.

Now Naumluk, the editor -in -chief of the Ukrainian edition of ґrati, and before moving to Kyiv, he lived and worked in Russia, so he helps the few Russian journalists who found themselves in Ukraine after the outbreak of war. Naumlyuk was one of the first to find out about the death of Oksana Baulina - on March 23, they agreed to call when Oksana returned from filming the plot. But she did not return.

“She leaves for the shoot, and literally after 45 minutes - I don’t remember exactly, but very quickly, they write to me acquaintances from the SBU, who supervised her:“ Listen, there is shelling, there are wounded and one dead, maybe it is she, because the two were taken to the hospital. ” And I am: “What, damn it? It’s as possible, like Kyiv, it is safe enough,” recalls Naumlyuk. - I look immediately in the news: there are no shelling anywhere. Then a message [mayor of Kiev] Klitschko appears, then a few more messages. But all this somehow sounds unconvincing, there was no airy anxiety, nothing, very strange. ”

But this turned out to be true: in the evening they fired at the territory near the Retroville shopping center on the outskirts of the Podolsky district of Kiev. A passerby died from one explosion, from another - Oksana Baulin. The two policemen accompanying her were injured.

Lviv. "It is difficult to stand aside from injustice"

Oksana Baulina worked in The Insider since the fall of last year, she came there to the position of producer. Ten years ago, she was engaged in glossy journalism, against the backdrop of mass protests against the falsification of elections in 2011-2012 became interested in politics and public life and in 2014-after the annexation of Crimea-resigned.

For several years she was a producing editor in Open Russia, then produced streams on the Navalny Live YouTube Canal and worked in. In the summer of 2021, the FBK was recognized as an “extremist organization”, but Baulina by the moment for a year has left Russia and collaborated with the project “So!”; Recently, she lived in Poland.

She went to Lviv from Poland - she could not sit still during the war. “Oksana is a person who is difficult to stand aside from the injustice,” says Baulin well and spoke with her a few days before his death. - And who needs to feel the process to the end, participate in it. She shared with me that she was psychologically difficult to sit in Warsaw and read, like Kyiv, Ukrainian cities - Mariupol, Kharkov and others - Russian artillery shells fall. How people die: children, women, men. She felt that in order to have the right to write about these things, it is very important for her to personally be in Ukraine. Feel the atmosphere, speak with people, see destruction. ”

Baulina agreed with the Ukrainian authorities that she would be missed into the country and allowed to record interviews with prisoners of the Russian military. “It was a long -standing idea of ​​the SBU - to make a good film, to show these prisoners to influence Russian mothers a little so that they do not send their sons,” explains Naumlyuk. “And we knew about these prisoners in Lviv for a long time, we knew that there was access to them.”

According to Timur Olevsky, editor of The Insider , it was assumed that Baulina would not only make prisoners, but make a film about the war, about what is happening in Ukraine and “why these guys were there.” She recorded refugees and the Ukrainian military, shot how children in Lviv learned to do Molotov cocktails, had to interview officials - for example, the mayor of Kyiv Vitaly Klitschko and the governor of the Nikolaev region Vitaly Kim.

The trip to Lviv was not considered dangerous, the city was almost not shelling then, refugees from all over the country flocked there. Oksana arrived in Lviv on March 11. Before the trip, says Olevsky, she went through security instruction. But at first she did not have a body armor - the journalist who had already met her on the border employees of the SBU issued a helmet and body armor.

“They gave her a heavy, large armor - such, almost,” says Naumlyuk. - Why am I? To the fact that then she will not wear it when she goes [to remove the destroyed shopping center]. And I, in principle, understand why - because it is Kyiv, and you never expect a danger there, and wearing a five on yourself is still a pleasure. ”

In Lviv, Baulina recorded an interview with four prisoners - among them there were frequencies, one during an interview called his mother. The journalist uploaded the video recordings to the cloud service and agreed with Olevsky that they would mount the film together when it returned from Ukraine. After that, Oksana took off about the crisis with refugees, and then convinced the SBU that accompanied the SBU that she needed to get to other cities - and even previously agreed on an interview with the mayor of Kyiv and the head of the Nikolaev region.

“And we thought that Kyiv is safer than Nikolaev, well, more interesting for it. She was also taken there, accompanied, she was never alone at all, ”says Olevsky.

Kyiv. "It is as if the rings of thunder, but in fact the missiles are stitched"

But even accompanied by SBU employees, the path to Kyiv due to many checkpoints stretched for ten hours. All this time, the SBU employees did not allow the journalist to remove a heavy body armor, her Kyiv friend says.

The Ukrainian security forces planted a journalist near Anna's house on the evening of March 19. Anna, who prepared food for refugees and fighters of Terborne in a cafe, prepared dinner with her. The next day, Sunday, March 20, Anna took a day off - chat with Oksana. Until it came, she showed her shops and nearest shelters. Together we reached the pharmacy so that Oksana bought a face cream that she forgot to take with me.

“I thought that she needed to help installing this new reality,” Anna explains. - I knew that cafes and shops were working in Lviv, although there were anxieties and shelling, but still not the situation as in Kyiv - with a commandant’s hour, with the features of the work of stores. You may have one task for the day: have time to buy something in a pharmacy or in a grocery, but you will not have time anything else. At the same time, I know that now spring Kyiv for a person from the outside may seem harmless and even a serene city. But when you are inside from the first day of the war, you adapt to what is happening, you understand that you can and cannot be done, it reaches automatism. It seems to me that this approach to security with Oksana and I was fundamentally different. For her, it was not only a city in the war, but also a new interesting working task. ”

In the evening, the girls went to walk Anna's dog. In the dark sky, Oksana saw how the air defense artillery was working. Anna invited her friend to go home, but she lingered - she said that she needed to throw a cigarette butt, and she remained to look at the gaps in the sky. Anna did not argue: “Try to tell Oksana what she needs to do, and she will tell you where to go. I know how stubborn she could be, she made all decisions on her own. ”

At night, a journalist, according to her friend, could not fall asleep for a long time - she went out to smoke on the balcony. That evening, the rocket hit the Retroville shopping center in the Podolsky district - most of the building was destroyed, eight people died .

“This is heard in the clear sky, as if the rings of thunder, but in fact they make rockets over Kiev,” Baulin later shared her impressions with Verzilov from the first night in the city. - But not everyone has time to knock down, and on Sunday the day the rocket flew - or its fragments fell - in the courtyard of a residential building, there was the glass, the funnel was huge. Well, at night, you know, the shopping center was bombed in the Podolsky district. ”

It is these destruction of Oksana that will go to shoot in two days - and will die.

Apartment on Khreshchatyk. “Everything is very nervous here. Everyone is suspected of a saboteur "

In the meantime, on March 21, she rented an apartment in Khreshchatyk in the center of Kyiv. Anna gave her friend products and conducted it. An employee of the SBU transported to the new apartment of Oksana.

“I now have a luxurious huge apartment right on the corner in the Needlemic Square. But the problem is that I have no hot water! So I have antique furniture, three rooms, a huge TV room ... There is even a little food - I managed to get it before the commandant’s hour yesterday. But there is no hot water, and this is an ambush. There is a boiler, I tried to turn it on, but he planted it with something, and I immediately turned it off. Now, as the gas is jerking here, the house is old, ”Baulina laughed, writing from this apartment Vois Peter Verzilov.

In Kyiv, she caught her eye with an almost complete absence of civil passers -by on the street - a lot of military and police, throughout the city of hedgehogs, concrete barriers and sand bags. “To be honest, I’m for and, while you could still walk the streets, I never dared to shoot something on the street. Because, damn it, everything is sooo nervous here. A saboteur is suspected of every person, ”she continued seriously.

From this apartment on Khreshchatyk, Baulin got out live on the YouTube channel The Insider -spoke about the road to Kiev and destruction in the city. “When there is no curfew, you can move, but it is forbidden to shoot roads, any military fortifications, you can’t shoot your military, police officers, that is, it is quite difficult to work as a journalist,” she said. “Today I was in the press center, I asked if it was possible to get a work permit during a commandant hour, they answered me, they don’t allow reporters, since all people must observe the commandant hour.”

The commandant hour in Kiev was just tightening , forbidding the townspeople to leave the house from 20:00 on March 21 to seven in the morning of the 23rd.

In the evening after the broadcast, Anna wrote to her friend that she had forgotten her several things. Oksana promised to pick them up on March 23 - after an interview, appointed at eight in the morning.

TC Retroville. "Now it is clear that she did not put on the body armor"

In the early morning of March 23, Baulina really interviewed Ukrainian officers. It passed outside the city, confirms Olevsky - the military talked about the situation at the front around Kyiv.

Around noon, she returned home and began to persuade the SBU employees to take her to the place of shelling, says Anton Naumluk. Usually the security forces who accompanied the journalist were busy, so they asked the police from the Podolsk department - it was there that the destroyed Retroville is located. Two employees were allocated in the department, and near them they left Baulina's house.

Before that, at 15:19, Oksana to his colleague Marf Smirnova: “Now specially trained people will take me to shoot destruction in Kyiv. Do you only need a footage, or record a stand -up from there? ”

Then the journalist called a colleague, but Smirnova did not take the phone - she was preparing for the air. “Write this, pliz, in a common chat, otherwise I’m usually on fire (leave this ourselves on Friday. We will make a great inclusion according to the results of the week,” Smirnova answered at 16:06.

A minute later, Baulina wrote that she “already removes” the destruction, and “it is difficult to organize so hard”. “Two police cars accompany me, armed to the teeth,” she added.

Apparently, this was the last message that Oksana sent. At that moment, she was already standing in the parking lot of the Retroville shopping center, where she came with two police officers. She was not the only journalist there: on the morning of March 23, the commandant’s hour ended for more than a day, so that all day reporters drove up to the shopping center, who could not get there the day before.

In the parking lot in front of the shopping center, there was also a film crew of Al Jazeera - it filmed the consequences of shelling. Bright smoke is visible on the record when it scatters, three people (one of them - an employee of the shopping center in an orange vest) run to the lying on the ground - this is the first victim. The name of the deceased has not yet been called, it also had an orange vest.

After 10-15 seconds, a girl appears in the frame, probably a police officer in the armor on top of the uniform comes behind her. The girl takes what is happening on the phone - from afar it seems that this is Oksana Baulina. But according to another video , Al Jazeera, shot from a closer distance, it is clear that this is another person - and she looks different, and she looks different.

Oksana at that moment, apparently, was on the other side of the shopping center - just the one that suffered from a missile blow on the night of March 21. It was there, in the parking lot near the Leroy Merlin sign, - Oksana lay on his stomach in a pool of blood, with her back to the shopping center. The two policemen accompanying her were injured, one was difficult: despite the body armor, a lung was pierced by a fragment.

“Now it is clear that she did not put on the body armor, and for some reason the police did not stop her-apparently, she decided, and they decided that it was safe,” says Timur Olevsky. - Nevertheless, they were in vests, but she was not. But Oksana knew that he needed to be worn all the time. All journalists in Kyiv wear all the time. ”

“I'm trying to analyze all the time now: but she would have saved him - saved or would not save? - Anton Naumluk admits. “Would they give her three three for journalists - would she wear her all the time?” I scroll through it all the time. ”

Versions. "Mina was released from the side of the village of Moshchun"

According to Olevsky, at first his sources among the Ukrainian security forces suggested that the journalist could become a victim of the attack of Dronov-Kamikadze-such a Kube drone, developed by the Kalashnikov concern, consists in the Russian army.

“They looked at the traces of the explosion, calculated the distance to the place of battles - the mortar does not finish so far, there were no“ grades ”,” Olevsky explains. “We watched the Air Defense report for this day, three shot down“ Cuba ”in Kyiv, one of them in that area.”

But the wrecks of the drone at the site of the shelling were never found. Now, according to the sources of Olevsky and Naumlyuk, the police and the prosecutor's office have aroused the criminal case that it was shelling with 120 mm mines.

“120 mm mine was released from a distance of about 10 km from the side of the village of Moshmun from the Gostoel direction,” says Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. - Two mines were released in the direction of the checkpoint, which was located near the shopping center, in the parking lot of which the journalist died. Another civilian died with her, and a policeman who accompanied Baulin was seriously wounded. ”

Sales. "There is such a procedure"

The death of Oksana Baulina was confirmed by seven in the evening, but the news about this did not report a couple of hours - they contacted their relatives so that they would not learn about the death of a journalist from the media.

The next few days have gone to the organization of the export of the body outside Ukraine, says Naumluk. “There is a procedure, quite bureaucratic: it is necessary that the police send a presentation with all its data to the morgue, in the morgue on the basis of this representation they make an autopsy, make the causes of death, and then the person must come to the district prosecutor’s office, draw up some documents there, and to pick up with these documents. There are also documents, since then it was necessary to translate it abroad, it was necessary to translate it into Polish, ”he says.

According to Naumlyuk, both the police and the SBU employees sincerely experienced what had happened - for them the death of a journalist in Kyiv also became a shock: “They say that we will do the corridor, we will help on the border. To quickly go through. It was so unexpectedly, really for everyone it was some kind of blow, some kind of crap, this should not be-in Kyiv a person stands, takes off, and suddenly herak, and there. Everything is a little in shock. "

The posthumous bureaucracy was complicated by either a commandant’s hour, then a mistake in the last name, then some other trifles. “It all ended that the body was taken in Kyiv on the morning of March 25, he was quickly brought to Vinnitsa, gave me her things, took her further to her to Khmelnitsky, and from there she should go to the border, to the Lviv region. And there it should already be transported across the border and sent to Warsaw, ”explains Naumlyuk.

The paperwork for crossing the border with Poland took another week: only on April 2 the body was delivered to Warsaw. Here, on the afternoon of April 3, a farewell will take place - but Oksana will be in a closed and sealed coffin. It is impossible to open the coffin, because she has to cross another border - this time with Russia, where Mother and Sister remained in Moscow by Oksana Baulina.

In the certificate issued in the morgue, the cause of her death is described as concisely as possible : .

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev

Fixed at 15:10. Oksana Baulina left Russia even before the recognition of the FBK “extremist organization”, and not after, as it was mistakenly said in this text.