Fox’s national security journalist Jennifer Griffin, for example, led coverage with updates from the Pentagon as explosions erupted throughout many Ukrainian cities and Russian troops landed in Odessa. “We’re seeing a full-scale invasion right now,” she stated on-air on Wednesday. “… Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia in the way he describes it. This is nothing more than a figment of his imagination. When you look into his eyes, you can see someone who has gone completely mad. What we’re witnessing tonight is a watershed moment in history, something that hasn’t happened in generations.”
Amy Kellogg reported from Moscow, and Steve Harrigan and Trey Yingst were on the ground in Kyiv, Ukraine, to support her perspective. Meanwhile, correspondents Mike Tobin and Lucas Tomlinson have been reporting live from Lviv, Ukraine, where the US Embassy has shifted its operations.
To some extent, all of the networks broke into and redirected regularly planned programming to present live coverage of the Ukraine issue throughout the night. Meanwhile, Fox’s efforts in this area, as well as the combined coverage of Fox journalists in Ukraine, are particularly noteworthy. Because Fox News Channel is the top-rated cable news network, viewers are increasingly turning to the network for breaking news coverage.
As a result, Fox’s programming on Wednesday night included Bret Baier, the network’s primary political anchor, providing coverage and analysis. Shannon Bream of FOX News @ Night preempted Gutfeld! at 11 p.m. ET for a special two-hour live report on the developments in Ukraine, as part of Fox’s overall Wednesday lineup. She then turned things over to Trace Gallagher, who was scheduled to take over live coverage of events in Ukraine on Fox from 1 a.m. ET to 4 a.m. ET on Thursday morning.
“The real question in this is how far is Vladimir Putin going to go?” Harrigan said at one point, during the Wednesday night coverage. “He declared an operation in Eastern Ukraine, and yet here in the capital city Kyiv, six hours away, we are hearing explosions. So is this capital city of 3 million people part of the attack or not? Or is it simply going to be surrounded and sealed off?
“Right now, what we can only imagine in the darkness is that key points in the city are being hit. Communications, airports, defense ministry, police. We’ve heard since I have been up here in the last few minutes maybe eight to 10 explosions and the slight orange glow after the explosions. Certainly a terrifying night for people here.”
Events in Ukraine also dominated pretty much the entire screen that viewers saw when logging on to foxnews.com Wednesday night, before scrolling down the page for other unrelated news headlines. “Russia bludgeons nation with missiles as bloody campaign forces Ukraine to go into lockdown,” the site’s lead story declared.
Also during the Wednesday night coverage, Fox News correspondents in Ukraine — where sirens could be heard sounding near Kyiv, a city of almost 3 million people — reported hearing several explosions.
“This was really the worst case scenario that everyone was talking about,” Yingst reported on-air. “Ukraine getting hit from multiple different angles.
“The fact is, this country, while they were preparing for the possibility of a Russian invasion, it’s always been very clear that this level of a sustained attack in multiple different locations around the country just simply would not be able to be defendable for the Ukrainian military … But the fact that we are seeing air strikes in the Ukrainian capital means that Ukraine and Russia are at war.”
