Transcript of Fox News wanted war images in Ukraine - their journalists died

I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and this is The Sunday Story. Let's go back to an event 2 years ago in a fancy ballroom in Midtown Manhattan. It's staged by the media giant Fox. Stars take turns promoting Fox's brands, including Fox News.

It's my honor to introduce Mr. Benjamin Hall.

War correspondent Benjamin Hall sets out a rousing mission for the network.

From Ukraine To the Middle East. And here at home, the dedicated journalists at Fox News are trying to inform America even in the most perilous of circumstances.

Hall knows peril all too well. In March 2022, while in Ukraine covering the war with Russia, the car he was traveling in was blown up. Hall lost a leg, his other foot, and one of his eyes. And so at this event for hundreds of industry executives, Hall stands on prosthetics in a suit that ends just above his knees.

These stories, they need eyes on the ground. They need a human perspective. They need us to bear witness.

Though gravely injured on that day in March 2022, Hall was the lucky one. 4 people in the car with him, 2 military escorts and 2 other journalists, were killed. Now, 2 multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the network are blaming Fox News for what happened. One of the lawsuits also places the blame on Star Fox correspondent Benjamin Hall. Today on The Sunday Story, David Folkenflik brings us his investigation into what went catastrophically wrong on the outskirts of Kyiv. We'll be right back.

We the people make a free press possible. Together, we hold power to account with reporting for the public, funded by the public. It takes all of us to protect the future of public media. Make your gift now at donate.npr.org.

In a war zone, reporting is a deadly gamble where you have to balance risk and reward. For one Fox News reporter, that calculation Not one person would have been injured if Benji had just listened to the advisory. Who's responsible for setting limits on reporting in a war zone when lives are on the line? Listen now to The Sunday Story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app. Opera singer Gabriella Di Laccio always loved Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi. But then she discovered she didn't know the works of thousands of female composers. It's not about taking people off the list. It's putting more people on the list. Tracking Down the Women Missing from Music. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This fall, there are a lot of movies and TV shows on tap for you to see, and we're as excited for all of it to arrive as you are. On Pop Culture Happy Hour, we've got a guide to what's worth keeping on your radar. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with The Sunday Story. I'm Ayesha Rascoe.

I'm handing things off to NPR's David Folkenflik, who brings us this exclusive story about a fatal assignment in covering the war in Ukraine. A warning: the following material involves graphic language about injury and death. It also contains a mention of suicide. Here's David Folkenflik.

Fox News gets accused of a lot of things, in headlines and in court. Typically, those accusations have to do with its right-wing ideology, the political agenda of its founder, Rupert Murdoch, and its pursuit of profits. In the story I'm about to tell you, the questions are different. They center on whether the network did enough to keep its own journalists safe while covering combat, and whether Fox gave one of its star correspondents free rein to ignore warnings as he sought to get images of Russia's bloody invasion of Ukraine. The correspondent's name is Benjamin Hall. Hall was known throughout his career for taking risks in pursuit of a story, but he'd also been accused of going too far. Such allegations resurfaced in Ukraine.

If you took Benji out of the equation, it would never have happened.

Aaron King was one of Hall's colleagues at the time.

None of this would've happened.

King was a high-risk security advisor for Fox in Ukraine, meaning he was paid to keep people safe.

Not one person would've been injured if Benji had, Just listened to the advisory, or Fox News put different protocols in place, or however it wanted to go.

Fox did not comment for this story, and it did not make Benjamin Hall available to offer his side of matters. In order to report on it, I conducted 15 interviews, reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents, and hours of television coverage. I also paid close attention to Hall's own words. He appeared on TV, of course, but he also presented his story in a Fox documentary and in his own memoir. Both came out in March 2023, a year after the fatal incident. So, what is Benjamin Hall's story? Benjamin Hall comes from a globetrotting family with roots in Britain, the U.S., and the Philippines. During World War II, Japanese forces in the Philippines imprisoned his grandfather and executed his grandmother and other relatives. U.S. troops rescued Hall's father, just a boy, during the fighting there. In his 20s, Hall wrote freelance articles from hotspots around the world. Here Hall is reading from his memoir titled Saved.

I saw a lot of death, had guns pressed against my head, dreamed horrific dreams. All of it an echo of what my father endured in Manila.

Hall says in his memoir that the first time he saw a man dying was in 2011 during a period of intense fighting in Libya. Hall writes he was confronted with a choice. Should he invade the dignity of the man's last moments?

I didn't have the time to consider all the moral angles. I could either keep filming or stop filming, and I chose to keep filming. When I met Benji, he was a freelancer.

This is Hall's wife, Alicia Miller, from Sacrifice and Survival, a Fox News documentary about her husband. I knew he did dangerous things occasionally. or a lot, but it didn't really matter. He loved what he did. And Hall kept doing it in Iraq, Somalia, Syria. He is a man with previous war zone experience all around the world. Here's Fox foreign correspondent Trey Yingst speaking about his admiration for Hall on Fox News Radio. His reporting in Syria before he even started at Fox was the gold standard. And yet there had been at least one red flag. During Hall's freelance days, a Fox News producer filed a formal complaint saying Hall had endangered colleagues to further his own career. The producer, Phil Itner, later set out his allegations in a sworn affidavit reviewed by NPR. He accused Hall of being, quote, addicted to the adrenaline rush of taking risks, and alleged that Hall took what Itner called, quote, ad-lib, unplanned, and reckless actions without proper intelligence and vetting to chase a story. He alleged that Hall pumped up stories in hopes of becoming a host for Fox in New York. Itner urged Fox to pull Hall, saying he was unfit to report for the network.

In the affidavit, Itner said he never heard back about his complaint. In 2015, Hall joined Fox News full-time as a London-based foreign correspondent, and he married Mellor. Then, In late 2021, they moved to Washington, D.C. Hall would cover the U.S. State Department. It was to be a more stable and safer role. That new path lasted just 4 months. On February 24th, 2022, Ukraine came under attack. Russia began a full-scale military assault. Hall got the call from a Fox executive. Will you go to Ukraine to cover the war? By this time, Hall and Mellor had 3 daughters together.

I understood my obligations to Alicia and my family, and I knew I had to stop putting myself in dangerous situations.

And yet, he didn't blink. Just 4 days after the Russians invaded, Hall arrived in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, several hundred miles west of the major action. Hall started hosting a show that aired nightly on Fox, reporting on the rising tensions.

It is a, uh, difficult moment in this war between Russia and Ukraine, But very quickly, news executives asked, could he go to Kyiv?

Fox had pulled most of its journalists from the capital city because of mounting danger. Hall writes that his wife urged him not to go. Hall assured her he'd be fine. Fox did have a team of high-risk security contractors to keep its journalists safe. Such security advisers are typically ex-military. They provide guidance, muscle, and medical aid. They can also serve as a brake on journalists who put their hunger for a story ahead of their own well-being. This can create tension. Aaron King was one of those Fox high-risk advisors. He says that, like Hall's wife, and like another Fox safety contractor, he told Hall not to go to Kyiv.

It wasn't in his best interest to go down there. And I asked him what he believed that he would achieve that other teams haven't already achieved at this point in time.

King says it was like all battle zone assignments, balancing the risks versus the possible reward.

He kind of processed what I'd spoken to him about for about 10 seconds, kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, ah, I'll go anyway. And then that was the last I seen of Benjamin.

There were some risks involved, but that's where the story was, and That's where we went.

This is Hall speaking about his decision in that 2023 Fox documentary about his ordeal.

In his memoir, Hall puts it like this: It was, in a way, the culmination of all that I had worked on and all the risks I'd taken before. It was the big one. The war that might change the world, change the course of history. This was who I was and what I had prepared to do.

The big one. The reporter's big story. The surfer's wave of a lifetime, but also the gambler's million-dollar roll. Hall couldn't resist. So off he went to Kyiv. This is The Sunday Story. I'm NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. I'll be right back.

Before Bernie Sanders or AOC, a man named Michael Harrington tried to market socialism to the American public.

Tens of millions of Americans were poor, miserable in body and in spirit.

On NPR's Throughline, how the founder of the DSA created a modern political movement. Listen to Throughline in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This election season, let the NPR Politics Podcast save your time and your sanity. We'll help you understand key races, which polls you can safely ignore, and what might happen if power shifts in Congress. Our short daily episodes come out every afternoon so you can spend less time scrolling Make NPR Politics your hub for midterm election coverage. Follow our podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm David Folkenflik. You're listening to The Sunday Story and my reporting on what went terribly wrong for a Fox News team in Ukraine. So let's pull back for a moment to consider the state of play. Fox News wants to get its rising star close to the action. That rising star believes this story is the big one. The one that might change the course of history. But the network's trained security advisers warn that the risks might be too great. So who makes the decision to go, and on what grounds? For Fox, as for all television news networks, the practical imperative is clear.

Well, inevitably, you've got to try and get the pictures.

This is veteran broadcast news executive John Williams. He oversaw international coverage at both the BBC and ABC News. Williams says television is all about bringing action to life. What's happening on the streets of Tehran or on— in Dubai or in, in, in Doha, when you can see buildings going up in flames, you have the images, you can tell the story. Getting such footage comes with risk, especially in a war zone. In 2022 alone, the year of this incident, 28 journalists were killed in conflict zones around the world, according to UNESCO. But Benjamin Hall, he was accustomed to risk. And he wanted images for his stories. Benjamin Hall arrived in Kyiv on March 2nd. The war was still in its infancy. Pierre Zakrzewski was already there. Zakrzewski was a crackerjack visual journalist and producer. Big-hearted, mischievous, easily recognized across the globe with a trademark salt-and-pepper walrus mustache. Sasha Kushnova was also there. She was young, just 24, new to the job and to Fox. She'd been with the network less than 2 months. She was what's known as a fixer, an independent contractor who spoke the language, knew her way around. For Fox, she served as a reporter, historian, and all-around troubleshooter, working sources and scouting possible sites and scenes to film.

When she returned from outings, she sent her parents reassuring video texts like this one. recounted by her mother, Irina Mamesur. She said, Mom, don't worry. We have security on these crews who are very experienced. In another, she jokes about keeping stylish under all the protective gear.

I'm a very fashionable lady and I make our team look good.

Sasha Kuzhnova was ambitious. Growing up, parents and friends say Kuzhnova had an unquenchable thirst for life. More learning, more photos, more travel, cooking, music, more of all of it. Her ambition now was to help Fox tell her nation's story to the world. Kuzhnova's father, Andriy Kuzhnov, says he was proud to see her career taking shape. I will tell you that I was very glad. I thought that getting into such a level of a global, vital company, fascinating material, interesting people. Her mother saw a calling. Why do journalists work? Journalists reflect the truth for the people. The Fox team, including Benjamin Hall, Pierre Soshevsky, and Sasha Kushnova, stayed at the Intercontinental hotel in the city's historic district known as Old Kyiv. Their plan was to get Fox what it wanted: more footage, more images of the ravages of war. Russian forces were close. They'd been actively attacking the suburbs just to the northwest of the city limits. Fox News high-risk security adviser Shane Thompson had gotten near that area. On March 12th, Thompson went out with Fox correspondent Trey Yingst. Thompson says they made it to a Ukrainian checkpoint in the northwest suburbs. He says for a time they felt semi-safe and then suddenly they didn't.

The trigger point for me was close fire. So we had mortars coming over. We took cover and then we evacuated back.

Kuvshinova had written about the same area a week earlier in a Facebook post. March 5th, 2022. Currently, the Zhytomyr Highway, Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Makariv, and the north of Vuhledar district remain the most dangerous in the Kyiv region. Despite the dangers, a number of Fox's TV competitors had already aired dramatic footage from Irpin, one of those suburbs to the northwest. It showed civilians trying to flee across a river beneath a burned-out bridge. Thompson says he understood why Fox wanted those images too, to convey the dangers and the stakes.

Just behind them, they've got a shot of a city where it's, uh, in smoke. They can hear gunfire, they can hear explosions. They wanted the atmospherics at the time.

But the risks were real. Dale Sutton is a former British Army paratrooper serving with Ukrainian troops in those suburbs at the time. And he tells me he told the Fox security advisers to steer the journalists clear. He describes for me here what it was like on the ground.

It's an absolute no-go area. It's beyond hot. These are the sort of things that we're facing on the ground. And you've got no business being here.

Beyond hot. No business being here. That was Sutton's warning. Thompson says that, on the night of March 12th, the team met for what they call evening prayers. That's British military slang for their nightly planning session. Senior producers from London and Jerusalem typically took part. So did network executives in New York. Thompson says he vetoed a proposed trip to Irpin. Furthermore, he alleges that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott participated in that call. Did she offer any guidance or directives about where they should go? Fox lawyers say Thompson has no evidence that she did. On March 13th, things escalated. Russian troops fanned out in the northwest suburbs. And past a checkpoint in Irpin, they shot dead an American documentary filmmaker and injured his colleague. In response, the mayor of Irpin publicly banned journalists. Don't come, he said. Stay out. That night at evening prayers, Thompson says the message was clear: stay inside the city limits of Kyiv. Irpin and the nearby suburbs were out of bounds.

There's no way we were going there. No way. Not after the credible intel what we had. And everything what we had before, it was all on point. There was nothing— there's no gray areas.

No gray areas. Do not go beyond Kyiv. We don't know precisely how the assignment pursued on March 14th, 2022 came about. What we do know is that sometime around midday in Kyiv, Benjamin Hall, Pierre Chashevsky, Sasha Kushnova, and a Fox Security advisor named Jock Gordon got into a white van at the hotel. They were hoping to get footage just inside the boundary of Kyiv where Ukrainian Defense Forces were building a perimeter line. They were escorted by 2 Ukrainian soldiers in a separate car, The Fox team set out toward the outskirts of Kyiv along the M07 highway. It bends towards Irpin and other suburbs to the northwest, a bit like an elbow. The team made it to the perimeter, but as Hall says in the Fox documentary—

We got to the trenches and they wouldn't let us film there.

But maybe they didn't have to go back empty-handed.

The 2 Ukrainian soldiers we were with said, well, if you like, we can film some of the abandoned villages that are just around the corner. And they wanted us to go in their smaller car rather than our big white van.

The van had the word PRESS in big letters on its hood and sides, more likely to draw Russian attention. So it was decided they'd go in the 2 soldiers' smaller car. That car couldn't fit the whole team.

There were only 3 seats available.

This is Dragan Petrović, the London bureau chief who helped to oversee Fox's Ukraine coverage. He's speaking in the documentary as well.

The decision was made On the ground by the team, that it was more important to have somebody who spoke Ukrainian, to have Ksaszta go with them rather than Jock.

So, to underscore what he's saying, Jock Gordon, the person charged with ensuring the team's safety, its security and medical care, he'd be left behind in favor of Krushnova, their 24-year-old fixer who'd worked for Fox for just 2 months. She was the only one who could speak in Ukrainian to the soldiers. Without Gordon, the Fox News team set off toward an abandoned area beyond the perimeter, an area that Fox security advisers alleged the team had been repeatedly warned not to visit. In his memoir, Hall says they anticipated it would be empty.

The Russian forces, we understood, would be at least 30 miles away and not pushing in our direction.

Let's pause for a moment to consider this point. Hall says they understood that the Russians would be at least 30 miles away. In court filings, Fox says that claim of 30 miles away is just what Benjamin Hall believed. And what the Ukrainian escorts believed. They were wrong, Fox says. Tragically wrong. But don't forget, Russian troops had just killed a documentary maker in Irpin. The mayor of Irpin had banned journalists for their own safety. And Dale Sutton, embedded with Ukrainian troops nearby, says he had warned it was beyond hot. Even Fox's own advisers say they had repeatedly warned their colleagues to stay within the city. Thompson says Jock Gordon warned them right there at the checkpoint to go no further. Gordon hasn't responded to my efforts to get comment from him. Exactly how far the Fox team ventured beyond Kyiv city limits is a point of contention. Thompson says they spent about an hour in abandoned villages northwest of the city. They got footage of destruction, even recorded some promotional spots, according to Zhyashevsky's widow in the Fox documentary. Finally, the team turned around to head back to Kyiv. Then the attack. It came on a stretch of road close to Irpin, near some light industrial warehouses, including an auto body shop.

The first missile came out of nowhere, lands about 30 feet in front of us.

This is Hall speaking with Fox's Sean Hannity a year after the incident.

Car got stuck, we couldn't go back, and Pierre shouted, Get out of the car. Everyone get out of the car. And the next second, the second bomb hits right in front of the left of the car.

Hall says besides Zakrzewski, he also heard the disembodied voice of one of his young daughters urging him to get out of the car.

I think I was out for a little bit.

Here's Hall from the Fox documentary.

And I wake up. First thing I knew, I was in trouble. I was on fire and I had to stop that. So I'm rolling around and I'm, I'm hitting my legs. I'm trying to get it out. And I'm looking at myself and I'm bleeding from the head. My leg is off. It's dangling off below the knee. The first thing I hear is Pierre saying, don't move, don't move. Russian drones.

Hall, by his account, dragged himself toward a nearby vehicle, and a soldier with Ukrainian special forces got out and pulled him to safety. Pierre Zashevsky bled to death at the scene. Sasha Kuvshinova and the 2 soldiers never made it out of the car. That afternoon, with no trace of the team, Shane Thompson and Jock Gordon began their desperate search to find them. They checked with Ukrainian military and civil authorities, hospitals, morgues. Journalists and security advisers for competing news outlets pitched in too. Finally, Thompson says, a doctor called. He asked whether one of the missing was British. His patient was severely wounded and had a UK passport.

So I went straight down there, identified it was Benji. Benji was in critical condition at the time. He was unconscious. He had his right leg below the knee missing. He had a nasty chest, throat, and face injury. He had injuries to his hand, injuries to his left leg.

Doctors in Kyiv had amputated Hall's right leg. He would need far more intensive care.

And soon.

Hall's departure from Ukraine and subsequent medical care required extraordinary measures worthy of a spy novel: a special rescue squad operating amid curfews, a voyage out of the war zone on the train of the Prime Minister of Poland, and a military airlift to Germany approved by the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Initially, the Fox security team couldn't find Sasha Kushnova and Pierre Jashevsky despite a desperate push.

We tried to locate their live-view devices, satellite phones, iPhones, and we just couldn't do it.

Then a call finally came in. The bodies of a French-Irish national and a Ukrainian were at the morgue. Zhyrskyi and Kushnova. This is the culmination of all that had come before. The drive to capture the news in images. 2 Fox journalists are dead. So are 2 soldiers. Fox correspondent Benjamin Hall has lost a leg, a foot, and an eye. So how did Fox News respond? The news organization had all the resources in the world to do right by their journalists and by those who survived them. What did Fox do for Sasha Kushnova's family? Here's her mother, Irina Mamysur. Fox treated us shamefully. Because they didn't consider us and didn't respect us. Fox has not addressed what it did in the days immediately following Sasha Kushnova's death in court papers or in comment for this story. Here's what Fox and its executives didn't do, according to Kushnova's parents. They didn't immediately call to tell them what they knew. and what they didn't know. They didn't send someone who spoke Ukrainian to serve as an interpreter and guide them through the terrible hours and days that followed. They didn't offer immediate comfort and condolences to demonstrate Sasha Kushnova was a colleague and peer worth caring about.

Instead, as Fox was pulling out all the stops to get Hall to safety, this is what Kushnova's parents say unfolded for them. When they did not hear from their daughter on the day of the attack, Irina Mamaysur sent her a series of text messages None were returned. Fox News, the couple say, also did not contact them that day. The next day, they say they got a call from someone on Fox's team in Kyiv urging them to pick up their daughter's belongings. Kushnova's father, Andriy Kushnov, refused. The man called back, but they say he revealed nothing about what had happened to their daughter. Still no call from Fox executives. It was Kushnova's boyfriend, 2 days after the attack, who brought her parents her suitcase and broke unwelcome news. She had died. Sasha Kushnova, their 24-year-old daughter, their shining light, was gone. Andriy Kushnov couldn't believe it. He and the boyfriend bundled into a car to retrace the path of the news team. At the perimeter checkpoint, At one point, Kushnov says, a Ukrainian post commander confirmed that he had seen the Fox team there and had warned Hall not to go farther. Kushnov's father says they ultimately came upon the site of the attack.

Everything there was ruined. Destroyed, that is. Erased from the face of the earth.

We found nothing.

Nothing left. Just the remains of burned cars. Kushnova's body was already at the morgue. Her parents identified their daughter there by her clothes, as, quote, the body had burned to ashes, according to Andriy Kushnov in his affidavit. On the 3rd day after the attack, the Kushnovs say, Fox finally contacted them— by email. A Fox News human resources executive was writing to offer money. The Kushtinovs say Fox had not gotten around to paying their daughter at all for her work. The HR executive said Fox would send the family a compensation package to take care of Kushtinova's back pay and benefits, funeral expenses. Oh, and she offered an additional cash sum to approximate the life insurance payout for a permanent employee. They offered general words of condolences. And then sent us a letter to resolve this problem from their point of view. Fox later called it, quote, a show of sympathy and goodwill. Kufshinov said he figured the network was simply paying standard compensation. He did not, he wrote later in an affidavit, think the payment covered any wrongdoing by Fox. One week later, on March 24th, Fox CEO Suzanne Scott sent a condolence note by email in English and Ukrainian, which NPR has reviewed.

Scott said colleagues admired the talent and passion Sasha Kuznetsova brought to her journalism. There can be no pain greater for a parent than losing a child. I know Sasha was an absolutely exceptional young woman, Scott wrote. She continued, We will honor Sasha in our work, celebrate her in our thoughts, and remember her in our prayers. Fox News posted a standalone tribute to her on its website that same day. Exactly 2 weeks after the deadly attack, Andriy Kushnov signed the papers agreeing to the compensation package. Irina Mamysur, still grieving in bed, did not sign. According to the Kushnovs, Benjamin Hall called them later. Once. The call was awkward and brief. The language barrier proved insurmountable. He cried. He was crying, and what he was saying was unclear. And that was the extent of what Fox did for its slain fixer, Sasha Kushnov. her parents say. It took Benjamin Hall months to heal from his severe injuries. Eventually, with great encouragement from his family and the network, he returned to Fox. In November 2023, Hall made his first trip back to Kyiv, televised by Fox. Tonight we have a very special story. Correspondent Benjamin Hall returns to Ukraine.

20 months after he was seriously injured there while covering the war with Russia. Hall was shown walking on his prosthetics, wheeling his bag along the length of a platform at a train station headed to Kyiv from Poland.

Last time I got onto this train, I was barely alive, badly injured, but we made it out the other side. Today's the day that we're going back.

Hall had an exclusive interview with the Ukrainian president. And that wasn't all, as Fox host Brian Kilmeade explained to viewers. Benjamin also received the Order of Merit from Ukrainian President Zelensky. There he is getting it. The 2 men were shown shaking hands as Zelensky presented Hall with a medal for his courage— the courage he showed in taking assignments to bring Ukraine's story to the world. Hall also met his Ukrainian rescuers to thank them. Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman of parent company Fox Corp., traveled to Ukraine to be there. The Kushnavs say neither Hall nor Murdaugh contacted them during the visit. Neither man thanked them, the couple says, for their daughter's courage, nor explained to them what had happened to her. So the person the Kushnavs say they learned all of this from was the man who became their lawyer. In March 2024, 2 years after the attack, the Kushnavs filed suit against the network and against Hall. They allege negligence over their daughter's death. They allege fraud over that compensation package, which Fox says is a binding settlement. High-risk adviser Shane Thompson joined them in the lawsuit, alleging Fox wrongly scapegoated him for what had happened.

Fox's contractor, Cipar, had let Shane Thompson go some months after the attack. Thompson and others tell me he's struggled with depression since the incident and tried to take his own life. Pierre Zakrzewski's widow, Michelle Rostanton, filed her own suit in London. She similarly alleges that Fox failed in its obligation to keep her husband safe. She declined to speak about the specifics of her case. Her suit's at an earlier stage, and less documentation has become public. Fox News rejects those allegations and is defending itself in court. As I've mentioned, Fox News and Benjamin Hall have declined my request for comment. They are facing lawsuits and accusations of failing to protect the lives of 2 slain colleagues. And in Sasha Kushnova's case, the allegation that they defrauded her parents. Fox says in court filings this was an unforeseeable outcome in a war zone, a place of deadly risk. Authorities in Ukraine, Ireland, and France are conducting a joint investigation into possible war crimes charges against the Russians for the fatal attack. Lawyers for Fox News also argue the network had no legal duty to tell Kushnova's parents the details surrounding her assignment or her death. And here's why.

Think back to that compensation package, the one Andrei Kushnov signed 2 weeks after his daughter was killed. Along with the compensation, it included a waiver releasing Fox from all liability for the fatal assignment, and it also contained an agreement to keep everything private, just between them. Irina Mamaysur. Сейчас уже лышается конфидентियलная информация и никому не разглашается. All this remains confidential information, and you will not disclose it to anyone. The odds the Kushnoffs will win their lawsuit in New York state courts appear long. They are up against a media empire. Still, the case has survived several moves for dismissal, and a judge approved what's called discovery. That allows the legal team for the Kushnoffs and Thompson to review Fox News's internal correspondence, its footage, materials, records and other evidence. In her order, the judge said it would be a grave injustice to deny the Kushnovs the ability to investigate whether Fox was telling them the truth. She noted that they were not represented by an attorney when the waiver and release were signed. And the judge said the Kushnovs were grieving the loss of a daughter while navigating a calamitous invasion by a large nuclear-armed country.

Fox has appealed, What happened outside Kyiv is unquestionably a tragedy. Not what anyone involved wanted. Sasha Kushnova's parents continue to mourn her and mourn everything else she had yet to offer. This world has lost Oleksandra Kushnova. A musician, a poet, an athlete, a photographer, and the best daughter. It lost my love. I remember a conversation I had 30 years ago when I was a young reporter at the Baltimore Sun with the then foreign editor, Jeff Price. He was generously ladling out tales from his days abroad. Such anecdotes are typically called war stories, even when they're not about war. These stories were. But then all of a sudden, he paused to say, you know, Dave, dead men tell no tales. What he meant was, no story is worth dying for. You have to live to write another day. Price wasn't saying don't cover war. He was saying make your choices with care when you do. They can change lives in an instant. While it declined comment for my story, Fox News pointed me to a statement it released when Sasha Kushnova's parents and Shane Thompson filed their lawsuit in 2024. While we understand the grief and continue to mourn the loss of both Pierre Chashevsky and Sasha Kushnova, we will respect respectfully defend against the inaccurate claims within this lawsuit, Fox said at the time.

The statement continued, quote, the safety of our journalists has always been our number one priority, and we are immensely grateful to the Fox News journalists who have covered the war in Ukraine, and we remain committed to reporting from the region.

That was NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik. This week's episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Sharon Mashihi and edited by Jenny Schmidt, Emily Kopp, and Sharon Mashihi. Fact-checking by Suzie Cummings. And engineering by Anli Huang. Our voiceover artists were Hannah Aghimi, Kevin Gilbert, and Polina Litvinova. Special thanks to our NPR Key Bureau colleagues, Polina Litvinova and Hannah Palomarenko, for reporting and translations for this story. Also thanks to Joanna Kakissis, Tony Cavin, Christian Monroe, Ida Pourasad, Ivan Nikolev, and Johannes Dörge. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo. Our supervising senior producer is Liana Simstrom, and our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and Up First will be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

Austin Tice is an American journalist who disappeared over a decade ago while reporting in Syria, and for years we've been searching for him. This looks like a secret passage. I'm just pushing the door so you can get in. Go, go, go. Listen to Where Is Austin Tice?

from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4 on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Tonya Mosley, co-host of FRESH AIR. I spoke with Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil about the Columbia protests and his 2025 arrest. While in ICE detention, he missed the birth of his son and had to listen to his wife give birth over the phone. I can never forgive those who stripped that moment from me.

Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get Fresh Air.