France unveils esplanade named after AFP journalist killed in Ukraine
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Mrs Oksana Soldin (centre), mother of Mr Arman Soldin, speaking alongside his brother Sven and sister Ena at the event on May 7.
PHOTO: AFP
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VICHY, France - The French authorities on May 7 unveiled an esplanade in the central city of Vichy named after Arman Soldin, an AFP journalist killed in Ukraine in 2023
“There are men whose light never goes out, and Arman Soldin was one of them,” Vichy Mayor Frederic Aguilera said during the ceremony, which was attended by Mr Soldin’s mother, brother and sister.
Mr Soldin, AFP’s video coordinator in Ukraine, was killed in a rocket attack near the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 9, 2023, more than a year after the Russian invasion began. He was 32.
He was reporting in Chasiv Yar, near the front line in the eastern region of Donetsk, alongside Ukrainian soldiers.
The city of Vichy is the birthplace of one of the most famous French journalists, Albert Londres, and hosts a school that offers journalism studies.
Mayor Aguilera said he was a “reporter and everyday hero who risked his life to inform us and give a voice to those who have none”.
“Your son was a just man, a man of integrity,” he told Mr Soldin’s mother, speaking at the ceremony also attended by journalism students.
AFP journalist Arman Soldin was killed in a rocket attack near the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 9, 2023.
PHOTO: X/@AFP
Born in Sarajevo, Mr Soldin was a French national. As an infant, he fled fighting in Bosnia with his family, taking a humanitarian flight to France on April 25, 1992.
“No one smiles like you,” said Mr Soldin’s mother Oksana.
“You thought you could save the world from its endless and illegitimate thirst for self-sabotage,” she added.
“You ran that day with your camera well ahead of the others, filming the horrors of others.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has hailed Mr Soldin’s “bravery” in a letter sent to AFP. AFP
