Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall returned to Ukraine over the weekend for the first time since the attack that left him catastrophically injured in March of 2022.
Hall’s trip was organized by Fox Corporation Executive Chairman and CEO Lachlan Murdoch after he was invited to visit the country by President Volodmyr Zelenskyy. Hall sat down with Zelenskyy for an interview that will air Tuesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”
Hall was severely wounded last year while covering the war in Ukraine when the vehicle he was traveling in was struck by incoming fire in Horenka, outside Kyiv. Beloved Fox News photojournalist Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova were killed in the tragic attack. Hall has been through roughly 30 surgeries, lost a leg on one side and a foot on the other, and also no longer has function of a hand and one eye.
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During his return to Ukraine, Hall also met with the servicemen who assisted in his evacuation last year and Zelenskyy awarded Hall with the Order of Merit, III class, for his “outstanding personal contribution to strengthening interstate cooperation, support for Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity.”
Hall chronicled his journey in “Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make it Home,” which was published in March 2023 and became a New York Times bestseller. Earlier this year, Hall read an emotional excerpt on “FOX & Friends,” describing how “everything went dark” as bombs went off around him.
“If I had the slightest iota of consciousness, it was a distant sense of shock waves and the feeling that every part of my body – bones, organs, sinew, my soul – had been knocked out of me,” Hall read. “I was all but dead but improbably, out of this crippling nothingness, a figure came through, and I heard a familiar voice, as real as anything I’d ever known. ‘Daddy, you’ve got to get out of the car.’”
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A documentary based on Hall’s harrowing ordeal aired on Fox News Channel after the release of the book and detailed his extraction from Ukraine and the arduous recovery that ensued. Hall, who is beloved by colleagues, has said his wife, Alicia, and three daughters gave him the strength to keep going.
Last week, prior to making the trip to Ukraine, Hall put a spotlight on the importance of journalism when he was presented with the Kenneth Y. Tomlinson Award for Courageous Journalism at the 30th annual Fund for American Studies journalism awards dinner on Tuesday night in New York.
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“I stand here today both as someone who has witnessed war, experienced one, the product of war in my own family, my father’s experiences. But I’m also a survivor of war. And I stand here feeling stronger than I have ever felt before. And I feel that because I feel convinced that the reason I was out there, the reason I was injured, is because we were doing something that was so important, it’s so important for ourselves, for our community, for our freedom, which is telling the truth to our viewers and our readers and our listeners,” Hall said at the famed Metropolitan Club.
“I lost my right leg, my left foot, shrapnel in my eye, burns across my body. My hand almost torn off. But most sadly is that Pierre, the cameraman who was like a brother to me, we traveled the world together, he died alongside me that day, along with Sasha,” Hall continued. “And I now think to this day, people ask me, ‘If you could heal yourself up, get rid of the injuries, but never have done a day’s work of journalism, would you take it?’ To which I say no. Absolutely not… I think that what we do, what every journalist out there is doing right now is essential.”
Fox News’ Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.
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