Further to my posting yesterday about the pressures placed on journalists in Ukraine, there have been more abductions. Both sides in the conflict were responsible for detaining reporters.
CNN reports that a Ukrainian journalist working as a fixer for the broadcaster, Anton Skiba, is being held by pro-Russian separatists.
Armed men from the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic seized Skiba outside a hotel in Donetsk on Tuesday (21 July). He had been working for one day with a CNN crew reporting on the MH17 crash site.
The broadcaster withheld the news for two days in the hope of securing Skiba's release without publicity. The separatists initially accused Skiba of posting cash rewards for the killing of separatist fighters on his Facebook page.
This accusation was subsequently dropped. Instead, Skiba was accused of using multiple forms of identification with different surnames and being a Ukrainian agent.
The US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that Russia was to blame for such actions by using "fear as part of its strategy to sow chaos in Ukraine."
On the same day, a British freelance reporter working for Russia Today, Graham Phillips, was seized along with a cameraman for the Abkhazian news agency (ANNA), Vadim Aksyonov.
Two other unidentified people were reported to have been detained with them - an employee of the press service of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and a possible acquaintance of Phillips.
Their captors are thought to have been members of the Ukrainian army. Aksyonov, who was released after two days, was reportedly tortured.
Sources: CNN/International Business Times/CBC/OSCE/Russia Today
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