All those who worked with salute the memory of a “true journalist” with an impressive career, energy and communicative good humor.
Died to inform. At the end of the day on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse announced the disappearance of its video coordinator in Ukraine, Arman Soldin, fatally struck in the afternoon during an attack by Russian rockets in the east of the country, near of the besieged city of Bakhmout.
Arman Soldin was part of a team of five AFP reporters who accompanied Ukrainian soldiers on the most active front of the war, around Chassiv Iar, a Ukrainian town near Bakhmout and targeted daily by Russian forces.
The war, an echo of his personal history
In Ukraine, the 32-year-old journalist also chronicled the lives of ordinary people caught up in war and trying to survive in the chaos. Like this woman taking care of her garden in Tchassiv Yar, or the story of the bread delivery man on a scooter on the roads of Donbass.
This highlighting of anonymous people seems to echo his personal journey. Arman Soldin was born in Sarajevo and was one of the first evacuees in France in 1992 when the siege began. He was barely a year old. “Refugee stories touch me,” he told AFP’s Making Of blog last year, interviewed from kyiv as he lit by candlelight.
“There was a family history with the war. It was unsaid, but by the messages that we could exchange, I felt that he was proud to be on the spot, to do the most noble job that ‘It is, inform people,’ recalls Johan Honnet, journalist for BFM Marseille Provence, and friend of Arman.
He was fluent in French, English and Italian but his origins helped him in his work in Ukraine. “I gibberish a bit in Bosnian, it’s also a Slavic language, we understand each other a little. Many women are called Oksana, my mother too,” he said.
“A real journalist”
Arman Soldin was a journalist who impressed. In 2015, he joined AFP as an intern in the Rome office. He was so convinced that he was quickly hired.
That same year, in London, he found himself covering the turbulent Brexit years. He returned to Italy in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic and found stories to tell even when everything was closed and everyone was confined, with the same humanity that characterized his work in Ukraine.
“He’s a real journalist, a real smart guy with whom I had the chance to share moments of work, reports, but not only. He’s a talented journalist, who loved his job, he knew why he covered the war in Ukraine, he was a rich person”, confirms Benoît Ballet, special correspondent for BFMTV in Ukraine.
“He had made a video of a guy dancing alone in front of the Vatican in deserted Rome, another video of a guy skateboarding in a completely dystopian city in Ukraine,” says a colleague.
A large part of Arman’s images were also shot on a mobile phone, not only for lightness but also to less impress those he was interviewing.
Communicative good humor
Everyone who met Arman described the energy but also the infectious good humor of this gifted footballer, who had worn the colors of Stade Rennais in the west of France from 2006 to 2008 but had given up his hopes of reaching the a professional career.
“He was brave, creative and tenacious,” AFP news director Phil Chetwynd paid tribute to him.
“He was overflowing with energy, that’s even how he defined himself on the networks. Totally devoted to his job as a journalist,” said AFP Europe director Christine Buhagiar.
On social networks, testimonials in memory of the journalist from those who knew him have multiplied in recent hours, hailing a “great guy” who “rescued wounded hedgehogs in a war zone.”
On March 21, he celebrated his birthday with an AFP team in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine. “We had uncorked a good bottle for the occasion, a colleague had taken out a guitar,” said one of its editors, Antoine Lambroschini. “And he was there, a small delighted smile on his lips”.
