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For more than two decades, Andriy Tsaplienko has been a war reporter, traveling to conflict zones around the globe. Two and a half years ago, war arrived in his country, Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin sent Russian tanks and missiles across Ukraine’s borders, Tsaplienko became a trusted source of information from the front line.
He’s as fearless a journalist as they come. Some of Ukraine’s military leaders told us they’re surprised he’s still alive. Tsaplienko told us he’s fighting for Ukraine’s survival… using his reporting – and the truth – as his weapons.
Andriy Tsaplienko is battle scarred and limping – yet like his country, he refuses to stop….close to Russia’s border last month, he filmed Ukraine’s 80th Air Assault Brigade…. with birch forest as cover from Russian drones, they showed him their American- supplied Stryker fighting vehicles – 19 tons of armor plated steel, topped with a 50 caliber machine gun.
He reported that the Strykers are helping the Ukrainians to storm Russian positions …one soldier said Russian land mines 15 yards away feel like a slight rustle against the armor.
Andriy Tsaplienko: Being a witness of what’s important going on right now. That’s for me.
Holly Williams: You like the front row seat of history.
Andriy Tsaplienko: Even more, I’d like to be in the middle of the story and to share this with the audience. So they are also witnesses of what is going on. This is important. My channel, they always want me to be in the studio as an anchor, as a host. I always refuse to be like that, because I’m a field journalist. I feel myself in– in the studio like a doll in a box.
Tsaplienko’s graphic accounts from the field – for the privately owned channel 1+1 – have shaped how many Ukrainians see the war. He’s told stories of heroism – but also turned a critical eye on his own country, revealing how some Ukrainians paid bribes to government officials to avoid the draft.
Andriy Tsaplienko: Freedom of speech, very important. It’s a crucial thing that helps us to win this war.
Holly Williams: A free media is helping you win the war?
Andriy Tsaplienko: Free media system helps us to win this war and will help us to win this war. Because we fight not for the government. We fight not for a particular person, like Russians do. They fight for Putin. We fight for ourselves, and we fight for our identity. We fight for our country and for values because we want this country to be free. That’s it.
Andriy Tsaplienko has some history with Russia. He grew up as a citizen of the USSR, in the city of Kharkiv – even doing national service with the Soviet military in the late 1980s. But at home he was listening to American rock music – and told us he worshiped American democracy. In 1990, he posted leaflets with his friends calling for Ukrainian independence from Moscow.
Andriy Tsaplienko: It was a kind of real rebellion because we expected that KGB could come to us and knock to the door.
Holly Williams: That must have been dangerous.
Andriy Tsaplienko: Yeah. We were waiting for the consequences. But– fortunately there were no consequences at all.
Instead, a year later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Tsaplienko told us he felt he’d finally been set free.
In the new, independent, democratic Ukraine, Tsaplienko became an international war reporter – one of Ukraine’s first. Beginning in the 1990s, he broadcast from Iraq and Afghanistan…Gaza and West Africa. He told us he learned how easy wars are to start – and how difficult they are to stop.
In February of 2022 – with over a hundred thousand Russian troops massed along Ukraine’s border – and 10 days before Vladimir Putin launched his invasion – we interviewed Tsaplienko in central Kyiv. He’d experienced Russia’s earlier invasion of 2014.
Andriy Tsaplienko: I travel to the east you know almost every week and uh… there’s some friends of mine here.
He showed us the Wall of Remembrance – a memorial to those killed since 2014.