JENNIFER GRIFFIN: I covered wars, terror and tragedy for Fox News. What I found was a family

I started reporting for Fox News in 1997, shortly after its launch in October 1996, while based in Moscow.Russian President Boris Yeltsin had just undergone heart surgery in November when I arrived, and the Mir Space Station, a Soviet-Russian station, with American astronauts on board, caught fire — the first fire on an international space station.Every Monday, Yeltsin seemed to fire his cabinet, sending shock waves through the Western world.

Vladimir Putin had moved to Moscow in 1996.In March 1997, Yeltsin appointed him deputy chief of the Presidential Staff and chief of the Main Control Directorate to work as an auditor in the Kremlin and to get close to Yeltsin.He later took over as head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and staged what independent critics, intelligence officials, and dissidents long alleged were a series of false flag operations that involved blowing up four apartment buildings filled with women and children sleeping in their beds to justify an invasion of Chechnya.During that time, in Moscow and St.

Petersburg, bankers were gunned down, their bodies found in the streets as the ruble crashed and the rising Russian mafia and oligarchs began dividing up Russian state enterprises and assets.FOX NEWS' JENNIFER GRIFFIN AWARDED 2024 PRIZE OF PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE AT THE FOREIGN PRESS AWARDSAfter starting with Fox in 1997, I remember standing on an icy-cold bridge on New Year’s Eve with the snow at times blowing upwards over the Moskva River and St.Basil’s onion dome cathedral lit up in the background as drunken Russians careened toward our camera position and fireworks lit the midnight sky over the Kremlin.I was learning on the job how to do stand-up and live shots for this new American cable television network, which hoped to compete with CNN.I was working for Simon Marks, a former ITN correspondent, who hired me as the Fox News correspondent in Moscow to work for Feature Story Productions, which had a contract to provide coverage for ...