Featured Image Credit: Alamy
Topics: Ukraine, World News
Hannah Smith
The widower of Halyna Hutchins – the cinematographer who was killed on the set of Rust after a gun held by Alec Baldwin accidentally went off – has said that her family is trapped in Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion.
Matthew Hutchins claimed that his late wife's mother, as well as her sister and niece, had so far been unable to leave the country as a result of Russia's failure to observe agreed evacuation routes out of the capital.
Halyna Hutchins was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine – at the time part of the Soviet Union – in 1979 and spent most of her childhood on a Soviet naval base in Russia. She studied journalism at Kyiv National University, and had retained her Ukrainian citizenship even after leaving the country and marrying Hutchins – a US citizen.
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According to Matthew Hutchins, his in-laws had remained in Ukraine, and now just months after Halyna's tragic death, they have found themselves trapped in the country amid an ongoing war launched by Vladimir Putin more than three weeks ago.
Speaking to TMZ, Hutchins said that his mother- and father-in-law have been 'hunkering down' in Kyiv after determining that they would be unable to evacuate the city safely following reports that Russian forces were attacking civilian evacuation routes outside the capital.
Halyna's mother is continuing to work in the same hospital where she was employed as a nurse before the war, he said.
Meanwhile, his sister-in-law and her three-year-old daughter are understood to have fled the active fighting, and are currently near the border with Romania with plans to find refuge outside Ukraine.
Hutchins praised the Ukrainian people for their resilience in defending their homeland and their efforts to expose the atrocities being committed against civilians by Russian forces. He also called for the international community to do more to support refugees and supply military aid to Ukraine, while calling for a no-fly-zone to be enforced over the countries skies – a move NATO has repeatedly rejected as a dangerous escalation of the conflict.
News of the family's ordeal comes five months after the cinematographer's death aged just 42, and amid ongoing legal wrangling between her husband and Alec Baldwin.
Matthew Hutchins has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Baldwin, who denies responsibility for Hutchins' death and has filed his own claim attempting to be released from liability.
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