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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reason I\u2019m actually filming this tonight is to show that what Russia<\/a> is projecting right now is a load of lies,\u201d he told the camera. <\/p>\n \u201cThey just had a St Petersburg conference with Candace Owens, with Andrew Tate<\/a>, with the who\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n \u201cWhere I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He returned to his apartment and edited the footage in bed. The minute-long reports were posted at dawn: 17,000 likes on X<\/a>, 35,000 on TikTok<\/a>, 84,000 on Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n Avowedly pro-Ukraine<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n He first gave expression to his filmmaking talents working for anti-immigration, anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson<\/a>, before renouncing the far-right and working with a series of journalists to expose the networks he now blames for having radicalised him.<\/p>\n This month he brought his gonzo reporting techniques and outrage about Ukraine\u2019s plight to Ireland after an Irish Times investigation revealed<\/a> the Russian-owned Aughinish Alumina<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n The viral reach and urgency of his reports helped add further pressure on the European Union<\/a> to include Aughinish in sanctions to prevent further exports<\/a> \u2013 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.<\/p>\n The issue has immediacy for Robertson. <\/p>\n After this week\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n Speaking over video-link to The Telegraph hours later, he picked up the metal debris and presented it to the camera.<\/p>\n \u201cThe components that were used in this shell casing came from the country I was born in,\u201d he thundered. <\/p>\n \u201cIreland are helping Russia and helping Russia kill people here every day.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not clear whether material produced at Aughinish Alumina is used in Russian weapons. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Robertson was born in Ireland in 1994 and grew up in Kilkenny. His ADHD<\/a> made school challenging, and it was an ill fit.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t like hurling,\u201d he recalls. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u2018Some of the stuff he says is over the top or overstated, but remember I used to work for the BBC, and there\u2019s a certain point at which young people have switched off the kind of thing I used to do\u2019<\/p>\n \u2014 \u00a0John Sweeney, British journalist<\/p><\/blockquote>\n His parents \u2013 Irish mum, Scottish dad \u2013 separated when he was about 10 and when he visited his dad\u2019s new home in Manchester and saw the big city, he decided he wanted to go to live there. <\/p>\n As he remembers it, his final straw with Kilkenny was when a priest found out he was gay and came to try to \u201cbless the house\u201d. He left about age 11.<\/p>\n Robertson sees a link between this and the later far-right turn in his politics.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t 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,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cpig\u2019s blood cocktail\u201d in 2015. <\/p>\n He pinpoints a mass shooting at the Pulse gay club in Florida the following year<\/a>, in which an Isis<\/a>-inspired gunman killed 49 people, as a radicalising moment that led to him watching increasingly extreme videos on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n He began an inflammatory alt-right Facebook<\/a> page called \u201cThe New Brit\u201d \u2013 he was identifying more with his British heritage at the time \u2013 which brought him into contact with Tommy Robinson.<\/p>\n In Robertson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Robertson pioneered the use of confrontation to create viral content, travelling to Dublin in March that year to ambush Repeal the 8th<\/a> protesters with questions such as \u201cwhen does consciousness start?\u201d, and making a report of their clumsy replies for the far-right Canadian website Rebel News.<\/p>\n By the summer of 2019, Robinson was in prison for contempt of court<\/a>, and Robertson had become disaffected from such causes. He gave an interview to the alternative outlet Byline Times saying he had been creating \u201cpropaganda\u201d that had led to an \u201cincrease in hate crime and violence\u201d in Britain. <\/p>\n 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\u2019d make it. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOccasionally, because he was so programmed in that world … he would say bizarre things, and you\u2019d realise, that\u2019s the residue of that life,\u201d recalled Peter Jukes, the co-founder and executive editor of Byline Times.<\/p>\n \u201cHe does empathise with everybody. That\u2019s what makes him such a great filmmaker,\u201d Jukes says. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He became close to two veteran British journalists, the former BBC reporter John Sweeney and war photographer Paul Conroy<\/a>. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n The documentary gathered evidence that Russia was using illegal chemical weapons in Ukraine against civilians, something Moscow denies.<\/p>\n During the film, the crew twice come within a few metres of being hit by strikes, the camera jerking as Robertson recoils from shelling.<\/p>\n A quintessentially \u201cCaolan\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a simple way to do stories like this and it\u2019s just: find out what\u2019s happening and try to get to it, and there\u2019s only so much that formal training can help with that,\u201d Robertson says.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cstop list\u201d.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cTo get people to care about these reports,\u201d he says, \u201cyou have to show the missiles landing, you have to show the smoke.\u201d<\/p>\n Sweeney, who was in Kyiv when Russia invaded and decided to stay, viewing Ukraine\u2018s fight as heroic resistance against a fascist aggressor, takes personal credit for managing to \u201cyank this filmmaking genius out of the far right\u201d and put him on a good path.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the stuff he says is over the top or overstated, but remember I used to work for the BBC, and there\u2019s a certain point at which young people have switched off the kind of thing I used to do. He manages to punch through,\u201d the former Newsnight and Panorama reporter says.<\/p>\n \u2018How do you get a viewership who are becoming war-weary, who don\u2019t perhaps view a missile strike in the same way they did in 2022, how do you get them to care?\u2019<\/p>\n \u2014 \u00a0Kashan Ali, British diplomat<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019m an old fart.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2018s also \u201cf***ing brave\u201d, he adds.<\/p>\n\n
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