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: Through the fog of war, Ukraine reveals 'Operation Vivaldi' counterattack near Lyman

by Francis Farrell
Ukrainian forces under the command of the 3rd Army Corps are conducting a series of counterattacks north of the front-line city of Lyman in Donetsk Oblast, corps commander Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi confirmed on Sept. 15. "The 3rd Army Corps has launched an offensive operation in this direction under the name Vivaldi," Biletskyi said. "This operation is being conducted under conditions of maximum information silence." Biletskyi said Ukrainian troops had cleared 75 square kilometers in northe

With no defense against ballistic missiles, Ukraine starts hunting Russian launch sites

by Francis Farrell
Instead of trying to shoot arrows out of the sky, shoot the archer. The medieval analogy can come off as simplistic and even naive when describing the task of defending a huge country from one of the most advanced and deadly weapons systems in the world. But for Ukraine, with a track record of seemingly impossible military feats, and looking down the barrel of likely the hardest winter of its independence, trying is not a matter of choice. On Aug. 22, President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed tha