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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source? Not that I’m doubting you, just curious

Sure:

https://nltimes.nl/2022/04/04/dutch-journalist-expelled-ukra...

He was asked politely first to remove the content, refused because 'it was his right', then was asked officially, still refused, then was arrested and expelled from the country after his Ukrainian press accreditation was revoked.

His employer claims that they did not know that this was forbidden, whereas war zone journalism 101 is pretty much 'don't share targeting info with the enemy'. The rocket attack that he covered has missed their intended target and within minutes he put a bunch of pictures online of where they had landed. Pretty bad episode, and ND (the newspaper he worked for) lost a ton of credibility with their positioning around this, they should have just admitted their mistake and move on, instead they focus on how the guy was treated. As far as I'm concerned he was pretty lucky, they could have easily believed he was spying for the Russians directly rather than just being monumentally stupid. I guess he couldn't wait to get his War Photo prize or something to that effect.

Placing him in chokehold and putting a gun to his head is a bit extreme, no? Security people seizing journalists' phones and deleting pictures seems to be pretty much routine. https://twitter.com/sethharpesq/status/1519849084286386177#m

But it's not like he just took the pictures, he immediately posted them on the internet. The damage was already done and their anger was somewhat justified.

Given that he's a professional and supposed to know better, what he did is difficult to distinguish from spying.

I assumed they would have shot him on the spot. Chokehold seems mild. You're in a war zone. Shooting people who put you in harm is a thing.

He's lucky he didn't get shot, I take it everybody is by now aware that there is a war going on there. The difference between 'Russian spy' and 'Dutch journalist' is in this case small enough that he should have been grateful at the restraint shown, especially given that he had ignored multiple summons to remove the content.

It’s war time there. The Russians may call it by other words, but hopefully we’d know better.

He may have been responsible for helping target and kill many civilians. He was asked to stop and he didn’t. Why didn’t they politely ask again, while maybe offering a cup of tea or something? It would be nice if they would have, but like we said it’s war time there.

> He may have been responsible for helping target and kill many civilians. He was asked to stop and he didn’t. Why didn’t they politely ask again, while maybe offering a cup of tea or something? It would be nice if they would have, but like we said it’s war time there.

Exactly. It's a luxury to treat a bratty punk with kid gloves, and some people don't have that luxury.

They don't really do "stand around and argue for 10min and then finally bust out the tazer when you still won't get in the damn car" enforcement in war zones.

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