The missiles began hitting Kyiv at 1.30am. Alone in his high-rise apartment overlooking the Ukrainian capital, the self-taught filmmaker Caolan Robertson gathered his camera, went outside and began recording himself, the sound of explosions in the background.
“The reason I’m actually filming this tonight is to show that what Russia is projecting right now is a load of lies,” he told the camera.
“They just had a St Petersburg conference with Candace Owens, with Andrew Tate, with the who’s who of the far right pretending that they are the bastions of peace. This is actually what they do, firing missiles into a busy city centre.
“Where I’m standing right now is a place where civilians live and work. There is no military targets, there is no reason to fire missiles into a place like this unless your intention is to kill everyday civilians.”
He posted a quick clip and moved on to a monastic Unesco World Heritage site that had been hit, where he recorded priests moving iconography to safety as firefighters fought the blaze.
He returned to his apartment and edited the footage in bed. The minute-long reports were posted at dawn: 17,000 likes on X, 35,000 on TikTok, 84,000 on Instagram.
Avowedly pro-Ukraine, self-made, without traditional journalistic training or editorial oversight but with well over a million followers across his various online platforms, Robertson (32) reflects a profound change in how people access news and information.
He first gave expression to his filmmaking talents working for anti-immigration, anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, before renouncing the far-right and working with a series of journalists to expose the networks he now blames for having radicalised him.
This month he brought his gonzo reporting techniques and outrage about Ukraine’s plight to Ireland after an Irish Times investigation revealed the Russian-owned Aughinish Alumina plant in Co Limerick supplies vast amounts of raw materials to Russian aluminium smelters, where it used to make aluminium later supplied to Russian arms manufacturers.
The viral reach and urgency of his reports helped add further pressure on the European Union to include Aughinish in sanctions to prevent further exports – something that was mooted in the early days of the invasion but never went further, and would be strongly resisted from Ireland due to the jobs at stake.
The issue has immediacy for Robertson.
After this week’s bombing, which killed 11 people in Kyiv, he discovered that a large chunk of what appeared to be a Russian missile had landed on the roof of his apartment building.
Speaking over video-link to The Telegraph hours later, he picked up the metal debris and presented it to the camera.
“The components that were used in this shell casing came from the country I was born in,” he thundered.
“Ireland are helping Russia and helping Russia kill people here every day.”
It is not clear whether material produced at Aughinish Alumina is used in Russian weapons.
On a visit to the plant this month, Robertson took a sample of alumina powder, which is set to be tested against Russian weaponry found in Ukraine to see whether there is a match.
Robertson was born in Ireland in 1994 and grew up in Kilkenny. His ADHD made school challenging, and it was an ill fit.
“I didn’t like hurling,” he recalls.
He liked recruiting classmates and neighbours into acting in horror films he made. Knowing he was gay from an early age, he found his school uncomfortably Catholic.
‘Some of the stuff he says is over the top or overstated, but remember I used to work for the BBC, and there’s a certain point at which young people have switched off the kind of thing I used to do’
— John Sweeney, British journalist
His parents – Irish mum, Scottish dad – separated when he was about 10 and when he visited his dad’s new home in Manchester and saw the big city, he decided he wanted to go to live there.
As he remembers it, his final straw with Kilkenny was when a priest found out he was gay and came to try to “bless the house”. He left about age 11.
Robertson sees a link between this and the later far-right turn in his politics.
“I didn’t like powerful religious structures in society and what they represented. I guess when I moved to the UK, that morphed into disliking Islam as another fundamentalist religious structure,” he says.
Robertson began a filmmaking degree in London but dropped out, finding he needed to work full time to afford rent. He stayed on working as a barman in Chelsea, displaying a characteristic knack for self-promotion by getting a national newspaper to report on his “pig’s blood cocktail” in 2015.
He pinpoints a mass shooting at the Pulse gay club in Florida the following year, in which an Isis-inspired gunman killed 49 people, as a radicalising moment that led to him watching increasingly extreme videos on YouTube.
He began an inflammatory alt-right Facebook page called “The New Brit” – he was identifying more with his British heritage at the time – which brought him into contact with Tommy Robinson.
In Robertson’s telling, he found Robinson a sympathetic character who he thought had been misrepresented by the media, and from 2017 dedicated his energies and filmmaking talents to transforming Robinson from a fringe figure into an internet superstar with a substantial revenue stream.
Robertson pioneered the use of confrontation to create viral content, travelling to Dublin in March that year to ambush Repeal the 8th protesters with questions such as “when does consciousness start?”, and making a report of their clumsy replies for the far-right Canadian website Rebel News.
By the summer of 2019, Robinson was in prison for contempt of court, and Robertson had become disaffected from such causes. He gave an interview to the alternative outlet Byline Times saying he had been creating “propaganda” that had led to an “increase in hate crime and violence” in Britain.
He recalled making a film about migrants trying to reach Europe from Turkey with Canadian alt-right influencer Lauren Southern, and finding himself empathising with the refugees and hoping they’d make it.
Byline Times took him on as a contributor, and he worked with a series of journalists to expose the structures, methods and funding of the far-right networks he had once operated within.
“Occasionally, because he was so programmed in that world … he would say bizarre things, and you’d realise, that’s the residue of that life,” recalled Peter Jukes, the co-founder and executive editor of Byline Times.
“He does empathise with everybody. That’s what makes him such a great filmmaker,” Jukes says.
Robertson filmed a series for the outlet about the negative impact of Britain leaving the EU, and made a film, Betrayed: The Truth About Brexit, that featured Grimsby fishermen who had voted to leave but felt they had been lied to.
He became close to two veteran British journalists, the former BBC reporter John Sweeney and war photographer Paul Conroy.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he was sent to report on the situation facing refugees. Soon after, he followed Sweeney and Conroy into Ukraine.
After Robertson competed a hostile environment training course at the insistence of Jukes, the three made Under Deadly Skies together with local journalist Zarina Zabrisky.
The documentary gathered evidence that Russia was using illegal chemical weapons in Ukraine against civilians, something Moscow denies.
During the film, the crew twice come within a few metres of being hit by strikes, the camera jerking as Robertson recoils from shelling.
A quintessentially “Caolan” touch in the film, according to Sweeney, is the scene in which an old woman living near the front line cries as she describes cutting down chestnut trees she planted decades ago for firewood. She then spots a new flower growing from the soil.
“There is a simple way to do stories like this and it’s just: find out what’s happening and try to get to it, and there’s only so much that formal training can help with that,” Robertson says.
In the wake of the film, the Russian foreign ministry announced that Robertson, Sweeney, Conroy and Zabrisky would all be personally sanctioned and placed on a “stop list”.
Robertson returned to the front to film the Russian use of drones to target civilians in Kherson, recording himself fleeing after he spots a drone hovering overhead, and calling a friend who tells him his sim card might be being tracked.
“To get people to care about these reports,” he says, “you have to show the missiles landing, you have to show the smoke.”
Sweeney, who was in Kyiv when Russia invaded and decided to stay, viewing Ukraine‘s fight as heroic resistance against a fascist aggressor, takes personal credit for managing to “yank this filmmaking genius out of the far right” and put him on a good path.
“Some of the stuff he says is over the top or overstated, but remember I used to work for the BBC, and there’s a certain point at which young people have switched off the kind of thing I used to do. He manages to punch through,” the former Newsnight and Panorama reporter says.
‘How do you get a viewership who are becoming war-weary, who don’t perhaps view a missile strike in the same way they did in 2022, how do you get them to care?’
— Kashan Ali, British diplomat
“It’s the kind of style that you might see influencers use in Dubai, before the Iranians hit it with drones. But the journalism, the heart of it, the soul of it, is good. Some of it is a little bit narcissistic, but then I’m an old fart.”
It‘s also “f***ing brave”, he adds.
This month, Robertson was awarded a Ukrainian national honour in recognition of his journalism by president Volodymyr Zelenskiy: the Order of Merit, third class.
Robertson describes his life as being divided in two: before the invasion of Ukraine, and after it. After arriving, he discovered he had Odessa ancestors on his dad’s side, something that gave him a greater sense of a personal stake in the conflict.
He now has a family in the country himself. Sweeney was the celebrant at Robertson’s wedding in Kyiv last November to Kashan Ali, a British diplomat.
The two had met a year to the day earlier at Kyiv’s Cuban-themed Buena Vista bar, where Ali had gone out for Friday drinks with colleagues after a difficult week in which Russia’s testing of an experimental new missile on Ukraine had caused several embassies to shut.
“I remember being in the corner of the smoking area of this bar, and about 10 o’clock, Caolan Robertson walks in. I have no idea who he is, but I know that as soon as he walks in, I need to speak to this man immediately,” Ali remembers.
He built up the courage to go over. “We started yapping, and we haven’t stopped yapping since.”
Their life together has a wartime intensity, punctuated by nightly drone activity and roughly fortnightly missile attacks. Whenever that happens, it’s action stations for Robertson.
“It’s not like: you hear a missile land at 2am and you turn over and try to go back to sleep,” Ali explains.
“It’s like: how can he capture that moment to tell the world that something horrifying is happening? How do you get a viewership who are becoming war-weary, who don’t perhaps view a missile strike in the same way they did in 2022, how do you get them to care?”
Ali is from a Muslim British Pakistani background. Was Robertson’s Islamophobic past discussed?
“It was abundantly clear from that first meeting that he didn’t now hold those views,” Ali said. “So yeah, we spoke about it, but also didn’t need to speak about it.
“People do change, and people are not the experience that they had 10 years ago.”
Ukraine does not have same-sex marriage, so the formal part was held elsewhere. But it was important to both to hold the celebration in Kyiv, the place that “will define the rest of our lives”, Ali says.
In his wedding speech, he thanked the Ukrainian army “whose daily efforts allow us to celebrate a day like today”.
Financially, Robertson is largely dependent on his 900 subscribers on Patreon, who pay between $4 and $100 a month to support his work, get credits on his films and watch him livestreaming.
The lack of a filter is part of the appeal.
“You guys are basically my only main friends here,” Robertson began a stream to discuss his grief after Conroy, who had become a close friend and father figure, died from a heart attack in February.
Without colleagues or an editorial structure, Robertson casts around for guidance when he is weighing difficult decisions about reporting, asking his parents, his followers, journalists he knows, even ChatGPT.
He returned from Ireland in a state of heightened anxiety. Pro-Russian accounts online were trying to figure out his family’s workplaces, he confided.
He perceived a negative tone and a focus on his far-right past in articles about him by traditional Irish media outlets that he found incomprehensible to the point of being suspicious.
He read various motives into it: professional jealousy, corrupt influence over journalism, a plot to use his past to add to routine Russian propaganda that depicts Ukraine as far-right.
He wanted to know whether this was something “co-ordinated” when The Irish Times got in touch with him.
“I’m worried what you’re going to write about me as an attack will be used as leverage by the Russians,” he said. When an article emerged elsewhere describing him as operating a “machinery of influence”, he contacted a top libel law firm.
“Anyone that’s taken part in this campaign against me will be exposed,” he texted.
A friend advised him that he needed to consider his personal security as his reporting got closer to touching on the interests of Russian oligarchs. He began to think he might die doing his work.
It was difficult to create new content in the circumstances. More than a day went by without new Robertson content appearing online. A million followers were waiting.