NPR Ukraine producers Polina Lytvynova and Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this story.
When the Fox News Channel hosted hundreds of advertisers and industry executives at the ornate Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan two years ago, the network centered attention on a tragic yet heroic figure: the war correspondent Benjamin Hall.
"From Ukraine to the Middle East, and here at home, the dedicated journalists of Fox News are trying to inform Americans, even in the most perilous of circumstances," Hall proclaimed .
Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall is treated for injuries that he sustained while reporting in Ukraine in March 2022. Fox News / Screenshot by NPR hide caption
Hall knows peril all too well. In the first weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a strike by Russian forces hit the car in which Hall's team had been traveling outside Kyiv.
Hall had nearly died. He lost his right leg below the knee, most of his left foot and part of an eye.
Two years after the attack, Hall stood center stage on prostheses, in a suit that ended just above his knees. He entered to a standing ovation.
Hall is interviewed about his book, Saved: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home , on Fox & Friends on March 10, 2023. Seth Wenig/AP hide caption
"These stories, they need eyes on the ground," Hall said. "They need a human perspective. They need us to bear witness."
Though gravely injured, Hall was the lucky one. The strike killed all four people who traveled with Hall that day:
The two Ukrainian soldiers who served as guides. Pierre Zakrzewski, a beloved Fox war videographer. And Oleksandra Kuvshynova, known as Sasha. The 24-year-old Ukrainian had just joined the team as a producer and interpreter.
Oleksandra "Sasha" Kuvshynova and Pierre Zakrzewski. Fox News / Screenshot by NPR hide caption
Fox has described the deaths as tragic and honored the fallen. Yet two multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the network blame it for what happened.
One of those lawsuits has been filed by Kuvshynova's parents, who also squarely blame Hall. In their first joint interview about the tragedy, they tell NPR they are speaking out to honor their daughter's life and document what they contend is the injustice of her death.
Andriy Kuvshynov and Iryna Mamaysur hold a portrait of their daughter, Oleksandra Kuvshynova, in 2024. Paula Bronstein for NPR hide caption
Two high-risk security advisers who worked for Fox News in Ukraine bolster the family's claims. In separate interviews with NPR about what happened, they say Fox News and its star correspondent ignored repeated and urgent warnings to stay away from the danger zone outside the city limits of Kyiv.
"If you took Benji out of the equation, this never would have happened," Aaron King, one of those security advisers, said. The other adviser, Shane Thomson, has joined the Kuvshynovs' lawsuit, alleging Fox scapegoated him for the tragedy.
This story is based on 15 interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of legal documents, as well as Fox's own broadcasts. Fox News, citing the ongoing litigation, declined NPR's repeated and detailed requests for interviews with Fox officials, news executives and lawyers. The network also did not make Hall available for interviews for this story. It additionally declined to respond to specific questions raised for this story.
Shane Thomson was a high-risk security contractor for Fox News during the beginning of the war in Ukraine. He has joined a lawsuit against the network. Sam McQueen for NPR hide caption
Yet one of the most revealing witnesses to Hall's character is Hall himself. He wrote a memoir, published a year after the attack, in which he acknowledged increasingly embracing risk as his career and ambitions progressed. The same year, he also presented his story in a Fox documentary.
Fox and its founder, Rupert Murdoch, have faced controversies, scandals and litigation before. Often, accusations center on the network's right-wing ideology, Murdoch's own political agenda or their relentless pursuit of profits.
Two words define the underlying allegations in the Kuvshynovs' wrongful death lawsuit against Fox and Hall: ambition and negligence.
Covering any armed conflict by definition involves peril. Hazards are often ambiguous; the boundaries of battle zones are fluid. Combat journalists for many news organizations, including NPR , have been killed.
But the Kuvshynovs and their legal team say what happened to their daughter was preventable — and foreseen. "This was a very avoidable danger that they were specifically warned about, as to [the] exact time and place that they could not go," charges Stephen Humphreys, a lawyer for the Kuvshynovs and Thomson.
American lawyer Stephen Humphreys is representing Kuvshynova's parents in their lawsuit against Fox News. He is seen in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2024. Paula Bronstein for NPR hide caption
In court statements in the Kuvshynovs' suit, Fox acknowledges the tragedy of the deaths of Kuvshynova and Zakrzewski. But the network counters the plaintiffs' claims on technical and legal grounds.
In declining comment for this story, Fox pointed NPR to a statement released in March 2024, when the lawsuit was filed.
"While we understand the grief and continue to mourn the loss of both Pierre Zakrzewski and Sasha Kuvshynova, we will respectfully defend against the inaccurate claims within this lawsuit," Fox said.
"The safety of our journalists has always been our number one priority and we are immensely grateful to the Fox News journalists who have covered the war in Ukraine and we remain committed to reporting from the region," the statement continues.
A dual British-U.S. citizen, Hall was inspired by his globe-trotting family's past. He wrote in his memoir that at the outset of World War II, his dad's family was in the Philippines. Japanese forces took Hall's grandfather prisoner and executed his grandmother and other relatives. U.S. troops rescued Hall's father, then just a boy.
In chronicling combat, Hall wrote, "I saw a lot of death, had guns pressed against my head, dreamed horrific dreams — all of it an echo of what my father endured in Manila."
In his 20s, Hall pinged from one hot spot to another, freelancing for outlets like Vice and Esquire , and Fox.
The first time Hall saw a man die was in Misrata, Libya, in 2011. He had a choice, he recounted in the memoir, titled Saved : He could turn away or, perhaps, "invade the dignity of those moments in order to 'get the story.'"
"I did not have the time to consider all the moral angles. I could either keep filming, or stop filming, and I chose to keep filming," Hall wrote. He added that he had just escaped being killed too.
Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst attends the 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 25. Paul Morigi/Getty Images hide caption
Back in London, Hall registered that he had undergone a profound transformation. "I learned that I could control my fear, even bury it, and keep moving forward into danger," Hall wrote. "I learned that the hellishness of Misrata was not enough to stop me from going to combat zones.
"And I learned that my normal civilized life would never be the same again. No — this was who I was now."
Years later, his colleague Trey Yingst would call Hall "the gold standard" for war zone reporting for the network.
But there was at least one early red flag. In a sworn affidavit for the Kuvshynovs' lawsuit, former Fox News international producer Phil Ittner said he had previously lodged a formal internal complaint that Hall's behavior in Syria had placed colleagues in danger.
"Ben Hall was addicted to the adrenaline rush of taking risks," Ittner wrote in the affidavit. "I worried that he put his career promotion ahead of the safety of the crew working with him." He called for Hall to be pulled from the field. Instead, Ittner wrote in the affidavit, Fox never responded. No known consequences ensued. (In its legal filings, Fox responded that Ittner has no knowledge of events in Ukraine as he had been forced out of the network three years earlier.)
In 2015, Hall promised his girlfriend, Alicia Meller, that he would find a safer path as they started a family. They soon married. He also took a full-time job in Fox's London bureau, which still entailed covering conflict and strife. But in 2021, Hall moved to Washington, D.C., to cover the U.S. State Department.
Benjamin Hall hosts Fox News Sunday on May 12, 2024. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images hide caption
"I made that final decision to pull back from the front lines," Hall wrote. "It was much harder than I imagined it would be to make this professional change in my life; the pull of distant wars never weakened or went away. But I understood new paths were opening for me."
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine. Hall got a call from a Fox News executive: Would he go overseas and cover the war? As he wrote, "I understood my obligations to Alicia and my family, and I knew I had to stop putting myself in dangerous situations."
Four days after the Russians invaded, Hall arrived in the city of Lviv. It was an arduous drive from Poland; he was swimming against the tide as long columns of motorists were fleeing Ukraine.
He started reporting and hosting a show that aired nightly on Fox. The major action, however, was hundreds of miles to the east.
Fox had established news coverage from Kyiv with a team of journalists; now it was pulling producers out as the risk increased. Only a skeleton crew remained.
Firefighters put out a fire after a bombing of the eastern Ukrainian town of Chuhuiv on Feb. 24, 2022, as Russian armed forces invaded Ukraine. Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
Yet Fox summoned all its journalists in Lviv for a Zoom call, Hall wrote in Saved . Executives hoped to send another correspondent to Kyiv.
"All of us wanted to go, including me," Hall wrote. He was the one invited.
Hall's wife urged him not to go, he wrote. He assured her he'd be fine.
Fox had a team of high-risk security contractors to keep its journalists safe. Such security advisers typically have military backgrounds. They provide guidance, muscle and medical aid. They can also serve as a brake on journalists who put their hunger for a story ahead of their own well-being.
Aaron King was one of Fox's high-risk security advisers. He says that like Hall's wife — and like another Fox safety contractor — he told Hall not to go to Kyiv.
"It wasn't in his best interest to go down there," King said. "And I asked him what he believed that he would achieve that other teams haven't already achieved at this point in time."
King says it was like all battle zone assignments — balancing the risks versus the possible reward.
"He kind of processed what I'd spoken to him about, for about 10 seconds, kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, 'Ah, I'll go anyway,'" King said. "And that was the last I seen of Benjamin."
In his book, Hall presented the pull to Kyiv as inescapable.
"I could not say no to the offer to go to Kyiv and continue anchoring the show from there," he wrote in Saved . "It was, in a way, the culmination of all that I had worked on and all the risks I'd taken before. It was the big one, the war that might change the world—change the course of history. This was who I was and what I had prepared to do."
Among the people Hall would encounter once he arrived in Kyiv was Sasha Kuvshynova, Fox's new Gen Z fixer.
Her Facebook page bears a motto in English: "if you never try you will never know."
Her other social media accounts brim with life too: music and film festivals, her photographic shoots, travel to Tuscany , pictures of her as a child , her cat, Zephyr. She posted about her pride that her father , trained as a physicist, taught her math.
Her accounts turned grim starting in February 2022, after the invasion by Russia. After a Russian strike on the primary television tower in Kyiv, she posted on Instagram : "Glory to Ukraine!"
Kuvshynova's mother, Iryna Mamaysur, and her father, Andriy Kuvshynov, spoke with pride laced with sorrow during hourslong interviews by video conference from NPR's Kyiv bureau, sometimes interrupted by air raid sirens. Their words were interpreted by two NPR Ukrainian producers present.
Kuvshynova's parents say she was remarkable from her youngest years. (Under Ukrainian naming conventions, Kuvshynova took the surname of her father, with an added "a" to reflect her gender.) She learned to read by 3, mastered English by 11 and showed flair as an interpreter early on, her mother said.
As a teen, Kuvshynova briefly aided foreign reporters during the popular uprising in 2014 against Ukraine's then pro-Russian president, who ultimately fled.
That's when she met Zakrzewski, the Fox video journalist, and discovered how to blend her interests into a single passion: to tell Ukraine's story.
When Fox approached her in early 2022 to aid its reporting on the coming war, she embraced the offer eagerly.
"I will tell you that I was very glad," her father said. "I thought that getting into such a level of a global, vital company [would be a good experience]. Fascinating material, interesting people."
"She was excited," her mother recalled. "She said, 'I have already found my profession.'"
Sergyi Badylevych kisses his young child as his wife, Natalia Badylevych, stands nearby in an underground metro station used as bomb shelter in Kyiv on March 2, 2022. Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
The Fox crew stayed at the InterContinental Kyiv, a luxury hotel in the historical heart of the Ukrainian capital. Other networks holed up there too. He encountered the familiar faces of Yingst and Zakrzewski, a crackerjack visual journalist with a big heart, a mischievous streak and a salt-and-pepper walrus mustache.
Kuvshynova had also moved into the hotel. As a "fixer" for Fox, she was in touch with people in the Ukrainian military and the government and scouted possible sites and scenes to film. She knew the language, and she knew her way around. It was home.
Kuvshynova would send her parents reassuring texts frequently. She let them know, for example, when she had returned from outings near battle zones.
"She said, 'Mom, don't worry. We have security on these crews who are very experienced,'" said her mother, Iryna Mamaysur.
And she joked, given the protective gear they all wore, that she was "a very fashionable lady who outfits our team."
Toward the end of each day, the team would hold what it called "evening prayers," based on a British military practice. The crew would break down its intentions for the next day and map out the logistics with Fox producers and security consultants. Senior producers in London and Jerusalem and even executives in New York City would participate in the call.
A senior network executive or security official was supposed to sign off on each assignment, particularly if it involved going near the front, Thomson, the security adviser, wrote in his sworn affidavit.
Thomson also alleged in the affidavit that the staff — "overstressed and overworked" before Hall's arrival — began "working to the point of exhaustion." The presence of an additional correspondent put an additional burden on Kuvshynova in particular, he alleged.
Initially, Hall wrote, he continued to host the live show from a hotel room balcony in the freezing winter morning.
Ukrainian service members look for and collect unexploded shells after fighting against a Russian raiding group in Kyiv on Feb. 26, 2022. Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
