MOSCOW – A Russian television channel said Wednesday it had lost contact with a British journalist reporting from conflict-torn eastern Ukraine.
RT said on its website it had been unable to reach Graham Phillips since the early hours of Wednesday after he went to cover intense fighting around Donetsk airport.
The channel said it received a text message from Phillips saying “All is fine” at around 2:00am, after which contact was lost.
RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, posted a link to the story on her Twitter account, saying “our stringer Graham Phillips has gone missing in Ukraine.”
RT said it had warned Phillips not to go to the airport since it was “extremely dangerous” but had understood from his social networking posts that he had gone anyway.
“So far we have not managed to get any definite information about where he is,” the channel, which broadcasts to an international audience, wrote on its Russian-language website.
Phillips, who writes on Twitter as GrahamWPhillips, last tweeted on Tuesday evening, saying: “There’s been some heavy shelling and I’m right by Donetsk airport as it looks to be an active night here.”
The Ukrainian authorities had detained Phillips for several days in May and questioned him on his reporting for RT before releasing him without charge.
RT, formerly known as Russia Today, was founded by the Kremlin to promote the Russian point of view on international affairs.
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