this is bbc world news. the headlines... in ukraine, the bbc has found evidence that russian forces have been forced to pullback from positions they held at the start of their invasion, five weeks ago. russia says ukrainian helicopters have attacked an oil depot in russian territory. ukraine has denied it's behind the attack. as russian troops leave chernobyl, the head of the un's nuclear watchdog tells the bbc he'll send a team to the plant as soon as possible. amazon is beaten by workers in new york, as they vote in favour of a trade union — a first for amazon in the us. covid—19 infections in the uk, have hit a record high with nearly five million testing positive for the virus last week. and the draw has been announced for the 2022 world cup in qatar.

england has drawn iran and the usa in group b. and former winners germany and spain have both been drawn together in group e withjapan. we will have a full round up of the days news at the top of the hour. datelined london will be on at 8:30 p:m.. now on bbc news it's the media show with ross atkins. hello and welcome to this edition of the media show. as you know, the war between ukraine and russia is into its second month, and we're going to look at whether there are differences between how ukrainian media has told this story and how the western media has told this story. and with some data emerging that there is a decline in engagement in the war in ukraine as a story to learn about, we're going to discuss what the media should do about that,

if anything. to help me understand this, i've got five guests for us to hear from the editor in chief of the economist zanny minton beddoes, who recently interviewed president zelensky, christina director of output for sky news, whose journalists have been directly in the firing line. the bbc�*s lyse doucet, bbc news's chief international correspondent who's been in kyiv throughout the conflict. but before we meet those three esteemed journalists, i want to bring in two ukrainian journalists, starting with alexei sorokin. he's from the kyiv independent. it's an english language publication. it's now followed by millions of people around the world. you may know it. and alexei, it's very good to have you on the media show. i wonder what you're covering today in the conflict. thank you for having me. yes, for us, as a local publication, it's important to show the human side of this.

we had a story on utility workers in kyiv who have to pick up debris and allow the city to continue with its everyday life. we we had stories about cities constantly shelling like kharkiv. we try to show the people, the ordinary people who are suffering from this war and those who are helping the country to cope with this. and yours is a very young publication. the kyiv independent was created in november. you've gone from that to having over two million followers on twitter all around the world. how do you and your colleagues feel about becoming one of the major sources on the biggest story in the world? obviously, i would rather maintain a very small publication and not be currently living in a war zone. but yes, we had to adapt very quickly. this happened practically overnight. we went from 20,000 followers on twitter to nearly a million in a week. we obviously had to

produce more stories. we had to produce more news items. we now have a 24/7 news feed, which also aggregates news stories and items from different publications. so with the growing attention comes growing responsibility and also our workload. well, i was going to say your workload has gone up. you must need morejournalists. i know when you started, you had some funding from the european union, but presumably you need more funding to staff all of the journalism you're trying to create. so how are you generating income? well, we had even before the war, we launched a go fund me page, we launched a patreon account. and before the full scale invasion started, we had a pretty decent turnout. i would say we were able to collect maybe a fifth of our yearly budget through donations.

now, after the war began, we are covered for probably two yea rs now. so the month of march allowed us to maintain afloat through this year and the next year. also, it's interesting to point out, and a lot of people are a bit shocked when i say that we haven't hired a single person during the recent month. we still have only three editors during the day. 0ne editor during the night and around 12 journalists. so it's just everyone is now working twice or even three times more than they did. i can imagine you are. so that's four editors, i2journalists, and i'm sure lots of people listening consume yourjournalism. and that's a small group of people producing very high impact work. and you're saying you've got enough money now to cover your costs for two years, which is remarkable just coming in in the last few weeks. well, you're in the capital, kyiv.

let's go west in ukraine to lviv and speak to the journalists. you're a journalist, you're a producer. i know you work with some western media outlets like npr from the us. and so you're a perfect person to ask whether you see a difference in the way the ukrainian media wants to tell this story and how the western media wants to tell this story? hello, everyone. thank you for having me. i started working with npr a few weeks before the invasion, actually. i started working as a local producer. since i quit my regularjob at ukraine world, and of course, i see the difference in how the stories are being adapted and, kind of, like, explained in a different way to western audiences, since not like ukraine could be a new topic to a lot of people who haven't been following it before.

so we have to explain the reason of this invasion and maybe like to give some background and some human stories are really important right now. even those that might be, like, kind of obvious to ukrainians, they could be very interesting to western audience and can explain things better, since human focus is always better to explain what's going on on the ground than some geopolitical analyses, probably. i see the difference in the way these stories are presented, but also maybe in the approach, because like right now, a lot of ukrainian media, theyjoined this national marathon and they are trying to broadcast things coherently and all together. and it's it's like a lot of patriotic sentiments there. and of course, it's different

because we are in the war time and a lot of people, they need some encouragement and they need to hear, like, both good stories, but also if they hear bad stories, they need to balance it and to keep people's spirits high. irena, do you feel that there is a tension then between that patriotism that many ukrainians are feeling since russia invaded and your journalistic duties? well, the first few weeks were really hard and to me personally as well, because it was very difficult. of course, it's impossible to separate yourself from being a citizen of this country, and you realise that that's your land that's being invaded, and your life could be in danger as well. it was very hard, and i was working a lot and i was trying to maybe work

all the time just to distract myself from all the reality that was happening, even though i was in the news. but sometimes i was just like breaking down because it was impossible to bear all this tension. and and of course, like, i tried not to be too emotional not to explain things in an emotional way, especially on my twitter, because i know, like different people are reading this information and for what i feel might not, might not resonate to other people who are not familiar with the situation on the ground. and right now, i kind of found this balance finally. and of course, everyone listening to you would completely understand that you would feel emotional about the situation that you and your fellow countrymen and women are in. listening to you is my colleague from bbc news, lyse doucet, our chief international correspondent.

lyse, you remain in kyiv where you've been throughout the conflict. as you listen to irina, i wonder if you recognise those tensions between the personal situations that journalists find themselves in, particularly bbc ukrainian colleagues, and also their desire to continue with their journalism as they normally would? may ijust begin by saluting 0leksey, irina and all of the ukrainian journalists, including my colleagues in the bbc�*s ukrainian service and other are are nodding, you know, it's one thing to cover a war, and we, as western journalists, get lots of plaudits. "wow, it's you know, you're so brave. "you know, you're so great." you know, viewers and listeners are lovely, but it's it's another thing to cover a war in your own home. i say, you know, we look at the maps every day, but when they look at the maps, they think my grandmother lives there or that's where i went to school. i grew up here, you know, and i've been seeing ukrainian journalists do this and telling us about it on, on social media, and they help us as journalists

who've come to come to ukraine to report on this war of our time. and we can only begin to imagine just how, how difficult it is and having to work, your office becomes your home, your bomb shelter becomes your office, and you know, staying with the story, so, well done. and like you, i loved 0lesky�*s, "you know what's a million twitter followers? "i'd prefer to be able to walk in the park "and go to a cafe at night in the great city of kyiv "and not to not to cover a war." i always say in ourjobs that, you know, emotion is not shouldn't be part of ourjournalism, but empathy certainly should be an empathy, especially now i don't i can't remember, maybe since the events of september the 11th, which of course, was a totally different times in terms of technology and the shape of the world where so many people have been interested in this war,

who wanted to stand up and be counted, who wanted to take a stand against russia's, notjust take a stand against this aggression, but also be seen to be doing something about it. it's been a really extraordinary moment and such a privilege as a journalist to have even just as a small part in the telling of this story, because so many are listening and so many agree with us that this story matters. and you referenced, lyse, in your answer, zanny, let's bring in zanny minton beddoes, editor in chief of the economist. i want to ask you about your interview with president zelensky in a moment, zanny, but i wonder what you would say in response to what we've heard already from colleagues in kyiv in lviv? well, i would absolutely second lyre in in saluting alexei and irina and all the ukrainian journalists who i can't imagine what it is like to report on a war in my own country. and i would also add to that saluting lyse, because i am absolutely not a war correspondent. i went to kyiv for two days.

i'm a complete ingenue in this, and having after that experience, my respect for you, lyse, and everybody else who does what you do has gone up, you know, even more. it'sjust extraordinary what you're doing too. so i'm, you know, it's it'sjust, for those of us who are not war correspondents who don't do this as a as a dayjob, it's just remarkable to see the bravery of ukrainian journalists and the bravery of international journalists who are there. the reason you the reason you were there was to interview president zelensky. do you thank you got that opportunity because of your senior position within the western media? do you thank you got access to this key figure in this story because you weren't ukrainian? i think it was a combination of factors, i think my colleague arkady 0strovsky, who is our russia editor, has interviewed president zelensky before, has very good contacts, knows a lot of people in the government in kyiv and had been in touch with them. and there was sort of talk of him

going to do an interview. and then when i said that i wanted to come too, it it happened reasonably quickly. we are a global platform. we get the word out to a lot of people. so i suspect that helped too. and before we talk about it any further, let'sjust hear a little of what you recorded when you were there. did you know you had this inside you, to be so brave? it's not about i'm bravel or not, but you can't say that if i would be the president of ukraine, i would _ do this way. i understood what's going on, so i understood it. _ a lot of months ago, what's going on? - that is very big history, this big story, it's - not only about ukraine, it's about the world, _ about the politicians of the world, and i think we could speak about it after we win. - yes, and i hope we win. i wonder, because, of course, this is notjust the president,

but someone who potentially is a target as well. what was the procedure of actually arriving to do the interview and where were you taken? so the procedure was quite something, and lyse would know this well, but a journey, we were staying in one of the hotels that journalists staying in the centre of kyiv and a journey that i'm told normally takes ten minutes took nearly an hour. as we were changing, cars taken past checkpoints. a lot of men with guns. a lot of anti—tank obstacles. eventually, we got to a big medal gate. we went through, and the the aide who was accompanying us said, and i remember it very vividly said, "welcome to our fortress." and then we went into the fortress down, down, up, down, all over dimmed corridors. we had to leave not just all of our electronics, but everything, including our pens, anything that could potentially give away our location. and we emerged out of out of the dimness of the corridors to a room that you will recognise, because it's the room that is used for those zoom exchanges that president zelensky has with, you know, when he speaks

to parliaments, when he speaks to people around the world. and frankly, it looks a little bit like a kind of corporate meeting room, you know, a white formica table, modern office chairs. and we were sitting in this room and suddenly there was a bit of a ke rfuffle. and in walk several people with guns and president zelensky, and he's now he's, as you heard from that clip, he's incredibly relaxed. i mean, just extraordinarily relaxed, authentic. we spent well over an hour with him. he spoke, he speaks very good english. i hadn't realised actually how good his english is and he indulged me. my colleague spoke russian, and he had a long conversation about what language the interview would be conducted in. he spoke to me a lot in english. he responded to questions in russian, but he felt it was important to respond to questions in english, in ukrainian, if not in english. and so we had this kind of complicated melange of languages. he cracked jokes.

he was just really empathetic too, and that was what really struck me. and you could hear that from the clip that you played. but we talked about what what a the future, what would a ukrainian victory look like? we talked about what he needed from the west. but for me, the most powerful bit of that interview was when i, towards the end, i asked him about vladimir putin and i asked him, you know, kind of what...what about vladimir putin? and he said something that wasjust stuck with me ever since, he said "putin is throwing russian soldiers like logs into a train�*s furnace." and it was, hejust couldn't believe it. you could tell in his voice that he couldn't believe someone could act with such inhumanity. and it was in such stark contrast, ithink, to him, and he is, he's, as you all know, irina, 0leksy, he is the kind of public face of this coming together of ukraine. i don't think he's running the war effort in a sort of detailed churchillian manner. his role in this is to be the public face, to be the international face he is doing it brilliantly.

and he's sort of, he's epitomising the resistance, the humanity of ukrainians against this extraordinary aggression. and that was really very powerful to me. and as such, and i want to bring in christina from sky news at this point. as such, zelensky and putin are the two dominant characters of a story that the world has engaged in. i wonder, christina, as you look at the different ways that sky has told this story, the different ways your audience has responded to the telling of the story. where do you see the most engagement? in what form does the story work best as the story? engage the most for the people you're broadcasting to? i think what's been really fascinating for me about this particular conflict, and sadly i've covered quite a few in my career is the engagement the young people have had in it. and i do put part of that down to actually the characters, zelenskiy, he is a very smart media operator. very smart. i mean, alex crawford interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, and he was really engaging. he's very engaging, empathetic.

i mean, he's an actor. he's good at all of that. but you know, his speeches he's made to different parliaments have used cultural references from different countries, including churchill. yeah, he's very, very smart. so he's really an engaging character. and i also think that there's, as you said, there's the two principal characters. it's like, it's like a drama, almost. it's it's really, really captured young people's imaginations. so there's been a huge interest in all our platforms at sky on this war, on this war. but what i've been really impressed by is how many young people have engaged in it. we started to do news items on tiktok before the war started. i thought it was a platform that was important to engage in. i was in, you know, we started off with something like 125,000 followers before the war. it's now nearly a million 990,000 people were signing up at two followers per second. a piece of video we put out, which actually was from a stuart ramsay report of a 19—year—old soldier young kid

never shot a gun before, standing on a bridge. it got 32 million views on tiktok and something like 15.5 million views on youtube. it's a war of the social media age and people, you know, people in ukraine, i mean, a lot of it, i've never had a war. we've had a video verification unit because so many people are filming what's going on there and giving us their stories. and so the the need to tell those human stories, which in your different ways, all five of you are doing every single day in your coverage of this story is, as you say, supported by the changes in technology that we've seen in recent decades. but irina, if i could bring you in at this point. earlier in the week, there was an open letter from both ukrainian and foreign journalists sent to the ukrainian government in which they called for the end of the harassment ofjournalists, but also asked for an end to the double standards for foreign and ukrainianjournalists. and i wonder if you feel that it is easier in some ways for western journalists

in ukraine to do the things that all of our guests have been describing than sometimes it is for ukrainian journalists? do you think those double standards exist? i don't think it's about double standards, but i think like since recent times, it's become quite chaotic. and this letter was addressed to the president and to the ministry of defence because of interruptions in journalistic work on the ground, both for ukrainian and both, and also for foreign journalists, for example, like a lot ofjournalists, are detained like stopped at checkpoints and interrogated for hours, or they are not allowed to take pictures or videos of places that seem not to be like strategic facilities or of any importance. so there are no like strict rules and instructions that all journalists could use to understand

how they should behave. and that was probably the main point of this letter. they were asking the government and the ministry of defence to define certain rules that journalists should oblige with not to not to harm the military, not to breach any wartime laws or rules, and at the same time perform theirjobs. so you're looking for greater clarity for journalists, and it looks very likely, unless there's some surprise turn of events in the talks in turkey, that this conflict will continue, thatjournalists will need to continue telling the story. but there is increasing amounts of evidence that perhaps interest in the conflict in ukraine is beginning to decline, admittedly from a point of huge interest around the world. 0lesky and lyse, i'd like to ask you about this, 0leksy, can you see a decline in the number

of people coming to you to learn about the war? yes, obviously we peaked at the end of february and starting _ in the early days of march. we see every day that the number i of clicks, the number of visitors i to our social media and our website is rapidly declining. _ those who are not invested in this conflict, _ for them, the story doesn't change. so russia continues its war, and they are interested - in something new. and we can see from google search data that people searching for ukraine, the number of people searching for ukraine, has steadily declined since the end of february. lyse, you've covered many conflicts, and i know from messages being sent to the bbc in the last few weeks, some people feel that while we're concentrating on ukraine, we're forgetting about syria or we're forgetting about yemen. how do we, as journalists, maintain interest in a story when we can see that arguably the audience is potentially turning away from it.

i think it would be hard to maintain the saturation of this story. it's been so emotionally charged. i said at one point that you listen to the news bulletins, the news is about ukraine. the business is about ukraine. the sports is about ukraine. everything except the weather was about ukraine. and of course, the weather here was subzero temperatures at that time. i don't think anyone can be that engaged for that long. but there is something different about this war, is that the impact of this war is so far reaching that food prices are being affected worldwide. energy prices are being affected worldwide. i'd like to believe because international norms and values are being affected worldwide, that whether the world likes it or not, they're going to have to pay attention to what happens in ukraine. and this is, of course, the responsibility of all of us to try to keep interest in this story to keep drawing people in. and there's another aspect, too,

is that, and i don't know whether 0leksy and irina agree, but we've seen terrible things in this war, and even more terrible things could happen if light doesn't continue to be shone on any atrocities to come. if the world looks away, the darkness, other things could happen in the darkness. and i think it is incumbent on the media to try as much as possible not to take an eye off this story, even if the engagement does come down a bit. and i'll come to irina on that in a moment. but christina at sky, i would like to ask you about that, when you're balancing coverage of ukraine versus coverage of the police finds over the downing street parties, for example, how do you gauge the the right way forward on that? well, the right way forward is to keep telling the compelling stories that are still there. we're committed. we've got three teams still in ukraine, and we have no plans to reduce that at the moment. independent, impartial eyewitness

journalism is really, really important. unless we put people there to go and find stories, we're not going to find out, as lyse says, we're not going to shine a light on what's going on. and so we've got that commitment and we'll continue that commitment. and then at the end of the day, you know, the stories are compelling. you can't see too many stories of little old ladies who are have been evacuated from their towns. it touches people's emotions. and myjob is to make sure that we are telling the stories that still engage people, but also continue to tell them the stories that are really important and what goes on and continues to go into ukraine is important. and as lyse said, for all of us in all sorts of different ways. 0leksy, just finally, is there something about this story that we're missing that after these weeks, we should turn our attention to 0lesky? do you think there's something that requires more coverage, more emphasis? i actually want to complement foreign publications for their work and a lot of human stories. the stories of atrocities, i think,

shifted policy in the west because sky news, bbc the times, wrote about them. we know the recent story in the times about the woman raped by russian soldiers. i think that's important to mention. that's important for the world to know. and i think i agree with colleagues here that even if we see that attention is dropping, ourjobs as journalists is to write about stuff that is important, and we should continue this. 0leksy, yours is going to be the final comment on today's media show. thank you very much for your contribution. thanks to all of our guests forjoining us. we heard from the economist. lyse doucet from bbc news. christina nicholas esquire�*s from sky news. alexi sorokin from the kyiv independent. and also from the freelance journalist and producer irina

who is with us from lviv. that is it for this edition of the media show. thank you very much indeed for watching. we'll see you soon. bye bye. hello there. it'll still be on the cold side this weekend, not quite as cold as it has been. wetter weather moving away from western scotland, still some showers for northern ireland into the night and some weather weather comes into wales in the far southwest with some snow over the hills. a more widespread frost i think across scotland and for much of england, a few icy patches as well. know near as cold as last night for northern ireland, nor indeed for wales. we will see the back of that wet weather fairly quickly in the morning, and then a fair bit of sunshine for a while. the cloud will bubble up again and we will see a few more scattered showers developing, not as heavy, and it is many as today, most of them for england and wales, scotland northern ireland likely to be dry. temperatures a degree or two higher than they were this afternoon. the second half of the weekend starts

cold and frosty, increasing cloud in scotland and northern ireland to marine for the north later on to marine for the north later on to marine for the north later on, god will increase across england and wales, wanted to two showers, many places will be dry with some sunshine at times, those temperatures continue to keep up a little bit to ten or ii sauce —— ten or ii celsius.

this is bbc news, i'm nancy kacungira with the headlines. in ukraine, evidence of intense fighting, as russian troops retreat, with civilians killed in the fighting. this is more thanjust a collection of terrible deaths, this is a crime scene because under the laws of war, civilians are supposed to be protected. russia says ukrainian helicopters attacked an oil depot in russian territory. ukraine has denied it's behind the attack. amazon is beaten by workers in new york, as they vote in favour of a trade union — a first for amazon in the us. millions of people in the uk are hit by the biggest rise in energy prices, in living memory. i'm scared to see how that is going

to go,