Two security advisers who worked for Fox News in Ukraine told NPR that the network and its correspondent ignored repeated warnings to stay out of the danger zone beyond Kyiv’s city limits before the March 14, 2022 attack that killed two of its crew.
Here is what is established, and what is only alleged:
- Cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and 24-year-old producer Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova died when a vehicle carrying correspondent Benjamin Hall’s team was struck outside Kyiv. Two Ukrainian soldiers serving as guides also died, and Hall was badly wounded.
- Kuvshynova’s parents sued Fox News and Hall in 2024 alleging wrongful death, fraud and defamation. Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, sued separately in London, seeking roughly $11.6 million according to reporting on the case.
- Fox has acknowledged the deaths and says it will “respectfully defend against the inaccurate claims,” and it has not made Hall available to NPR.
The Part Most Coverage Skips
Almost every write-up treats this as a new accusation against a famous network. It is not new. The Kuvshynov case has been in a U.S. federal court since March 2024, and the most consequential thing in the file is not the advisers’ account. It is a December 2024 ruling.
According to NPR’s reconstruction, Fox offered Kuvshynova’s parents wages, benefits, funeral costs and extra compensation within three days of her death. Her father signed paperwork on March 27, 2022, two weeks after she was killed, and has said he did not understand that Fox might be admitting liability. When Fox moved to dismiss, the judge refused. She called it “a grave injustice” to deny the family a chance to investigate, noting that they had signed while grieving, without lawyers, and possibly without an accurate picture of what happened.
That is the real legal question here. If the paperwork Fox points to was signed under those conditions, the network’s strongest procedural defense is also its weakest moral one. The judge did drop Rupert Murdoch and chief executive Suzanne Scott as defendants, so the corporate-leadership angle that makes headlines is gone. What remains is narrower and more specific: who decided the team would go.
What the Advisers Say Happened
Shane Thomson, a security adviser who is himself a plaintiff, says he vetoed the Irpin trip at the evening briefing on March 13 and told Hall explicitly not to leave vetted areas. Aaron King, another adviser, told NPR that when he questioned the value of the assignment, Hall said he would “go anyway.” A British Army veteran working with Ukrainian forces, Dale Sutton, says he described the area as “an absolute no-go area. It’s beyond hot.”
Hall’s account in court filings is the opposite. He says Ukrainian soldiers suggested the detour toward Horenka, that Russian forces were “at least thirty miles away,” and that he did not consult executives in New York about the March 14 assignment. Those are his claims, and no court has ruled on whose version is right.
The context cuts against the “nobody could have known” reading. American documentarian Brent Renaud had been killed by Russian forces in the same area the day before, and Irpin’s mayor had warned journalists to stay away.
Where This Leaves Fox
Thomson’s claim of what happened to him afterward is serious too. He says Fox employees implied he had a drinking problem, which he denies, that he was blamed for the deaths, and that the security firm SEPAR let him go months later without explanation.
We think the case turns on a question the network can answer and so far has not: who at Fox, in New York or in the field, had the authority to say no on March 14, and did anyone use it? A network that built its reputation on covering the war does not get to treat that as a technicality. If the advisers are right, the warnings were specific and delivered the night before. If Hall is right, the advisers are misremembering a chain of command. Discovery will settle which, and Fox has so far fought to keep it from happening.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office is separately investigating the attack as a possible Russian war crime. Nothing in the civil suits changes who fired the missiles. They ask who put the crew within range.