‘If You Look In (Putin’s) Eyes, You See Someone Who Has Gone Completely Mad’

Fox News Channel reoriented its programming Wednesday evening, February 23, to provide live overnight coverage of the crisis in Ukraine, where Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the launch of a military operation early Thursday morning local time — with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy quickly responding by imposing martial law in the country.

Against the backdrop of explosions unfolding across several Ukraine cities and Russian troops landing in Odessa, Fox’s national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin, for example, led coverage with updates from the Pentagon. “What we’re seeing right now is a full-scale invasion,” she said on-air Wednesday. “… The way in which Putin is describing Ukraine, he is describing it as an existential threat to Russia. This is a figment of his imagination. If you look in his eyes, you see someone who has gone completely mad. What we are seeing tonight is a moment in history, something we have not seen for generations.”

Her analysis was complemented by a Fox reporting team that includes correspondents Amy Kellogg reporting from Moscow, with Steve Harrigan and Trey Yingst on the ground in Kyiv, Ukraine. Correspondents Mike Tobin and Lucas Tomlinson, meanwhile, have been providing coverage live from Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine where the US Embassy relocated its operations.

All of the networks, to some extent, broke into and reoriented regularly scheduled programming to provide live coverage throughout the night of the Ukraine crisis. Fox’s efforts along these lines, meanwhile, plus the combined coverage of Fox correspondents in Ukraine are especially worth paying attention to. Because, as the top-rated cable news network, that, by extension, also means that Fox News Channel is increasingly where viewers turn for breaking news coverage.

Accordingly, Fox’s coverage Wednesday night also included chief political anchor Bret Baier weighing in with coverage and analysis. Fox’s overall Wednesday lineup got tweaked a bit, such that FOX News @ Night’s Shannon Bream preempted Gutfeld! at 11 pm ET for a special two-hour live report on the developments in Ukraine. She then handed things off to Trace Gallagher, to take over live coverage of events in Ukraine that was set to run on Fox from 1 am ET through 4 am ET early Thursday morning. 

“The real question in this is how far is Vladimir Putin going to go?” Harrigan said at one point during the Wednesday night coverage. “He declared an operation in Eastern Ukraine, and yet here in the capital city Kyiv, six hours away, we are hearing explosions. So is this capital city of 3 million people part of the attack or not? Or is it simply going to be surrounded and sealed off?

“Right now, what we can only imagine in the darkness is that key points in the city are being hit. Communications, airports, defense ministry, police. We’ve heard since I have been up here in the last few minutes maybe eight to 10 explosions and the slight orange glow after the explosions. Certainly a terrifying night for people here.”

Events in Ukraine also dominated pretty much the entire screen that viewers saw when logging on to foxnews.com Wednesday night, before scrolling down the page for other unrelated news headlines. “Russia bludgeons nation with missiles as bloody campaign forces Ukraine to go into lockdown,” the site’s lead story declared.

At various points during the Wednesday night coverage, Fox News correspondents in Ukraine — where sirens could be heard blaring near Kyiv, a city of almost 3 million people — reported hearing several explosions.

“This was really the worst case scenario that everyone was talking about,” Yingst reported on-air. “Ukraine getting hit from multiple different angles.

“The fact is, this country, while they were preparing for the possibility of a Russian invasion, it’s always been very clear that this level of a sustained attack in multiple different locations around the country just simply would not be able to be defendable for the Ukrainian military … But the fact that we are seeing air strikes in the Ukrainian capital means that Ukraine and Russia are at war.”