The name of Arman Soldin echoed across the world on May 9. “Thank you for the truth” - was the message coming from all the parts ruled by common sense. What remains afterwards is the gratitude for courage and persistence in a story about a human, about the one whose small wishes and big suffering would be untold forever if it was not for Arman. And Arman understood them very well. As a baby, Arman fled the horrors of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And nothing could stop him anymore. He lived in France, Great Britain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Ukraine – and those who came across him on this journey are saying their last farewell today, on May 30, when Arman is laid to rest. His friends, family and colleagues agree: If you speak about Arman, it is tears and laughter all together.

Arman is a person that friends, family and colleagues will describe in the same way – everyone through their own experience. With some of them he shared the moments of growing up and with some the nightmares.

“He was fearless,” said his sister Ena, right before joining the commemoration for Arman in Rennes, France.

She said she could not remember any part of her life without Arman, “who was never a burden to his parents, and never had any demands like other children do.”

He did not burden them even from the front lines in Ukraine.

“Don't worry – he used to tell us. We didn't even dare to tell him to take care of himself. His colleagues told us later on that he was so thoughtful towards random people he was encountering in the war – recording them with his mobile phone instead of camera, so not to scare them away, to make them feel more comfortable,” said Ena, crying and laughing at the same time to this memory.

France’s Macron mourns the death of Sarajevo journalist in Ukraine

She confirmed the words of his colleagues – Arman was touched the most with the stories of refugees.

“But, I can tell you, one hundred percent, he was never happier, more fulfilled and more content with his decisions… And ever since it happened, I am cursing wars, forces, weapon…,” said the sister of the Sarajevo-born reporter, who was killed in the east of Ukraine, earlier this month.

Arman always made plans for nice things. He planned to visit his mother and brother this month for their birthdays. They never met him again.

One of his best friends, Lucas Colin, told N1 that Arman found the meaning of his job in Ukraine. And he never lost sight of anyone.

“I think I am the only friend who ever saw him crying… He liked love stories and such things. Despite that, he was a man who always had a good joke prepared, he could always make you laugh, he was the leader of all of us. Actually, that's what he is doing today, too,” said Colin.

For more than a year Arman witnessed the horrors of war in Ukraine, and only for once he told his friends he was scared.

Daphne and Elizabeth, also war reporters, met him in some very challenging times.

Daphne remembers she first met him during a training for reporters during the war.

“I could immediately see he was born to do that. It came so natural to him – he was brave and focused. He was smiling and telling jokes in a stressful environment. I thought I didn't know him, but if I ever reported on a war, I wished to be on his team. When he finally arrived in Kyiv where I was waiting for him, it was snowing, and as soon as I saw him it was like a sunrise amid a nightmare,” said Arman's colleague.

Elizabeth met Arman in Donbas. He told her he used to be a refugee – just like her, and that this is why it matters to speak about what is happening.

“Now I want even more to learn about what happened to Arman in his childhood in Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said Daphne, noting that they found out the details about his past only after he was gone.

After everything that Arman went through in his childhood and afterwards, after everything he left and recorded, the question remains – do some people die at all?