Team
Francis Farrell photo

Francis Farrell

Senior Reporter

Francis Farrell is a senior reporter at the Kyiv Independent. He is the co-author of War Notes, the Kyiv Independent's weekly newsletter about the war. For the second year in a row, the Kyiv Independent received a grant from the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust to support his front-line reporting for the year 2025-2026. Francis won the Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandy for war correspondents in the young reporter category in 2023, and was nominated for the European Press Prize in 2024. Francis speaks Ukrainian and Hungarian and is an alumnus of Leiden University in The Hague and University College London. He has previously worked as a managing editor at the online media project Lossi 36, as a freelance journalist and documentary photographer, and at the OSCE and Council of Europe field missions in Albania and Ukraine.

For media & speaking inquiries:
press@kyivindependent.com

Articles

Analysis: New Commander-in-Chief Drapatyi faces a manpower mess of Syrskyi's making

by Francis Farrell
"The transformation of the defense forces cannot end with a change of minister, team, or department head. It must continue until fair and understandable rules become the norm for everyone who serves the state." The words of Mykhailo Drapatyi, posted on Facebook just days before he was named Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces, foreshadowed the challenges he would soon face. Two and a half years after he took over the job from popular general Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Oleksandr Syrskyi's ten