Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent in Ukraine, has paid tribute to the broadcaster’s “brave and committed” technical staff and said they had even helped with a dental emergency.
Doucet, currently based in Kyiv and a familiar face of BBC journalism from war zones, said she and her fellow reporters could not do their jobs without a team of producers, camera people and technical support staff.
In an article for the Radio Times, she said an engineer had been able to help when she broke a tooth while reporting from Ukraine.
“When I broke a tooth and couldn’t access the emergency CT scans from a Ukrainian dental clinic, Sully swiftly downloaded some software and dispatched a photo to my dentist back home,” she said. “Within hours of my appointment for a root canal in Kyiv, an urgent email arrived from London [saying] ‘you don’t need one!’.”
She flew to the Ukrainian capital in late January and has been reporting on the Russian military buildup and subsequent invasion.
She regularly joined the BBC News presenter Clive Myrie, who recently returned to the UK, during news bulletins from Ukraine.
Doucet said: “The news bulletins might have looked like the Clive Myrie show in the BBC’s Kyiv bunker but that’s only the half of it. Getting the real story out of Ukraine … takes a team of brave and committed producers, camera people and technical support. We BBC correspondents and presenters could not do our jobs without them.”
Myrie heaped praise on his colleague Doucet on Monday, describing her as “one of the best journalists of our generation.” Last week he shared photographs on social media of them during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
In a separate interview with the Telegraph, Doucet said her emotion “doesn’t matter” when she is reporting.
She said: “Nobody wants to see my emotion, it doesn’t matter – except to me. We’re here to report, and convey what’s happening here. There’s enough emotion in war already without adding more. We’re not trying to be heroes. It’s what we do.”
