(opinion article)

March 13, 2025, Kyiv. Sofia Cholas, a young war correspondent from RADA and ICTV, delivered a lecture to first-year students, majoring in Journalism and Media production in an airy audience room of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University. 

While delivering her well-structured and well-illustrated lecture about the key challenges of the present-day war Ukrainian correspondents, she demonstrated her own video materials and featured segments of TV programs broadcast on Ukrainian TV. Practically all of them were taken from the frontiers of the Russian-Ukrainian war featuring mortar and artillery shelling, dim dugouts and deep ditches, focused and weary faces of Ukrainian soldiers.

As the lecture progressed, Sofia plunged more and more into her wartime memories. There were even moments when it seemed that her soul flew back to her brothers-in-arms, somewhere to ruined ghost towns in the Donbass and Kharkiv regions. At these moments, a veil of sadness clouded her sincere smile, and she made short pauses…

Without any doubt, her lecture touched the hearts of all her listeners. It turned out to be highly professional, honest and memorable.

At the end of the lecture, personally, I caught several ideas flashing suddenly in my head, “The more meetings with such war correspondents as Sofia Cholas will our students have the more honest, professional and compassionate journalists will bring up our University… The second idea was a bit shorter – With such sisters-in-arms, the Ukrainian Army will stand its ground.”