Sky News Journalist Shot, Wounded in Ukraine

British journalist Stuart Ramsay has been shot and wounded while reporting on the conflict in Ukraine.

Ramsay, Sky News’ chief correspondent, was driving along a freeway towards Ukraine’s capital city Kyiv alongside camera operator Richie Mockler, producers Dominique Van Heerden and Martin Vowles, and local producer Andrii Lytvynenko on Monday Feb. 28 when their car was ambushed by Russians, who showered it in a hail of bullets.

Despite the Sky News team shouting that they were journalists, the shooting did not stop. Ramsay reports he was later told the group were a “saboteur Russian reconnaissance squad.”

Vowles and Lytvynenko exited the car while Ramsay, Van Heerden and Mockler remained inside, even as the bullets kept coming. “We knew we had to get out to survive, but the incoming fire was intense,” Ramsay reports.

Van Heerden managed to get out of the car, crawling towards a freeway barrier before diving “down a 40-foot embankment, rolling to the bottom.” Moments later Ramsay, still in the car, was hit in the lower back by a bullet. “What amazed me was that it didn’t hurt that bad,” Ramsay recalled. “It was more like being punched, really.”

“It was strange, but I felt very calm. I managed to put my helmet on, and was about to attempt my escape, when I stopped and reached back into a shelf in the door and retrieved my phones and my press card, unbelievably. Richie says I then got out of the car and stood up, before jogging to the edge of the embankment and then started running. I lost my balance and fell to the bottom, landing like a sack of potatoes, cutting my face. My armour and helmet almost certainly saved me.”

Mockler, who was the last to leave the car, took two bullets to his body armor.

At the bottom of the embankment, using a concrete wall for cover, the five journalists saw a factory, where three Ukrainians opened the door and enabled them to take shelter. There they contacted the Sky team in the U.K. to arrange for extraction from the country. The quintet spent the night in an office in the factory before Ukrainian police arrived to take them back to Kyiv the next day.

A Sky News source confirmed Ramsay, Vowles, Van Heerden and Mockler have now returned to the U.K. while Lytvynenko has been reunited with his family in Lviv.

Although Sky News declined to comment on Ramsay’s current condition, Ramsay has written an eyewitness account of the ambush for Sky News’ website.

Variety spoke to Ramsay just a few days before the ambush, when he said: “There’s too many things that can go wrong with these types of set-piece events. If they get it wrong, suddenly we’re on a bus being attacked by the Russian military or someone else.”