CNN journalist stops live report to help elderly civilians trying to flee Kyiv

|HT|

A CNN journalist is being lauded for stopping her live report to help elderly civilians who were trying to flee the war-hit Kyiv as Russian forces closed in on the Ukrainian capital. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been displaced due to the Russian invasion as they seek a relatively safer place to stay. CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward, who recently reported from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover, was in Kyiv to report on the Russian aggression and its impact on Ukraine residents. In a video shared by CNN, many elderly can be seen navigating the uneven ground full of debris from a destructed bridge.

“These people have been under bombardment for seven straight days and are only just leaving their homes, and they're leaving them reluctantly. And they're leaving them with the knowledge that they might not be able to go back to them. And you can see many of these people are elderly,” Ward said on-air before she stopped to help an elderly navigate the ground. She resumed her reporting for a brief period before stopping again to help a visibly distraught elderly woman.

“I’m just going to help her carry this bag a second, excuse me John,” she told CNN’s John Berman as she moved away from the camera for a few seconds.

“So people are obviously incredibly affected by this situation. They're frightened. They're exhausted. They're on edge. They've got their pets. They've grabbed whatever they can,” she said. According to a UN refugee agency estimate, over a million people have fled Ukraine in just one week of the war. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement more people are "fleeing the terrifying reality of violence" every minute as countless have been displaced inside the country.

"International solidarity has been heartwarming. But nothing – nothing – can replace the need for the guns to be silenced; for dialogue and diplomacy to succeed. Peace is the only way to halt this tragedy," Grandi added.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)