“Arman is dead.” This is the first news I and a small group of journalists received about our friend Arman Soldin, a videographer who died Tuesday  in Ukraine. We have been writing about war and destruction, but now words are pitiful, incoherent lumps. 

War followed Arman his entire life. He was born in Sarajevo a year before the Bosnian War engulfed Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but he and his family found refuge in France. Arman quickly became fluent in French, English, and Italian along with his native Bosnian.

That Slavic language became a boon to his reporting in Ukraine. Arman’s work took him to Ukraine’s battle lines in some of the most perilous places. He was under no illusions about the danger he faced, and brushes with death were not unknown to him.

On May 1, he wrote about his experience under fire during an assignment near Bakhmut, describing the close pounding of Russian rocket as “pure terror” and “one of the worst things that I’ve experienced.”

Details about Arman’s death will surely come out in the coming days. For now, we only know that a Russian rocket struck somewhere around Chasiv Yar, a small town three miles west of Bakhmut in Donbas.

The rocket landed six feet from where Arman was standing. Shrapnel from the detonation pierced the side of his body. We are told he died within two minutes.

What would I have done or said to Arman in Ukraine had I known it would be our last time together? We would do what we’ve always done — talk about the war’s progress in some dank, smoke-filled bar in Kyiv or look at a map in a hotel somewhere in Donbas over pulls of cheap whiskey.

So, this is what I do and pour two drinks — one for me and one for Arman. My friends and I, overseas and in Ukraine, check in with each other only to find we’ve all done much the same. We commiserate over drinks, far afield though we be.

“Does Arman’s death change anything?” a journalist asks me. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war that killed Arman has not stopped. I would say “yes,” for the loss of a great war correspondent is no small thing. Yet we may never be able to quantify that loss.

I’ll hazard one thing. What Arman chose to do with his life, short though it was, places him in the pantheon of war reporters who fell bearing witness, uncovering the truth, and covering stories that would otherwise be lost. And so a son born of one war is now fallen in another.