An A.F.P. journalist was killed by rocket fire near the intense fighting in the area around Bakhmut.

A video journalist working for Agence France-Presse, the French news company, was killed by rocket fireplace close to the city of Chasiv Yar in japanese Ukraine, A.F.P. stated on Tuesday. Some of the heaviest battles of the conflict are being fought in and across the close by metropolis of Bakhmut.

The journalist, Arman Soldin, 32, and 4 colleagues had been with Ukrainian troopers after they got here underneath a Grad rocket assault on Tuesday afternoon, the company stated. Mr. Soldin was killed. No one on the remainder of the staff, which included a safety adviser, was injured.

Mr. Soldin is the seventeenth journalist to be killed in Ukraine since 2022, in accordance with the Committee to Protect Journalists. His demise got here simply two weeks after a Ukrainian journalist was killed and an Italian journalist injured in an assault on their method to the town of Kherson in southern Ukraine.

Mr. Soldin was one of many company’s first journalists to reach in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion, and he recurrently reported from the entrance traces. He survived a detailed rocket assault final week whereas reporting on troopers who had been digging trenches close to Bakhmut.

Mr. Soldin additionally shared lighter moments from the entrance traces — final month, he rescued an injured hedgehog discovered within the aftermath of Russian shelling in Chasiv Yar. Mr. Soldin and his colleagues constructed a makeshift shelter for the hedgehog, whom they named Lucky; collected bugs for him to eat; and “started googling what baby hedgehogs need,” Mr. Soldin wrote on Twitter.

When Lucky lastly accepted water from a bottle improvised out of medical gear, Mr. Soldin rejoiced: “I AM OFFICIALLY A DAD !”

Mr. Soldin, a French nationwide who was born in Bosnia, was “courageous, creative and tenacious. He was above all an excellent journalist who was totally committed to the story,” Phil Chetwynd, A.F.P.’s international news director, stated in a press release.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, paid tribute to Mr. Soldin on Tuesday, tweeting that he had courageously been on the entrance from the primary hours of the battle “to establish the facts. To inform us.” He added, “We share the pain of his loved ones and all his colleagues.”