Aleksandr Martemyanov was killed in a Ukrainian drone attack on a civilian car carrying reporters
Kiev believes it can kill journalists with impunity because Western-aligned human rights watchdogs and press freedom organizations pointedly ignore Ukrainian war crimes, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a press statement on Saturday.
A group of Russian journalists was documenting an indiscriminate Ukrainian shelling of the Donbass town of Gorlovka on Saturday. Their car was struck by a UAV as they drove back to the regional capital of Donetsk, killing Izvestia reporter Aleksandr Martemyanov and wounding five other journalists.
According to RT correspondent Roman Kosarev, who chose another route, his colleagues’ car was struck far from the frontline, with not a single military target in sight. The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman called the attack a “deliberate murder.”
“The Zelensky regime openly resorts to terrorist methods to eliminate its ideological opponents,” and this “deliberate murder of a Russian journalist is yet another brutal crime in its series of bloody atrocities,” Zakharova said.
Zakharova criticized international organizations, including the UN human rights body, for failing to address crimes against Russian journalists. Kiev enjoys impunity for its actions because “international structures such as the UN OHCHR, UNESCO and the OSCE deliberately ignore its crimes,” she stated.
The recent draft ‘Report on the Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity,’ presented by UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay, “did not mention a single employee of the Russian media killed by Ukrainian militants,” Zakharova noted. Azoulay’s bias and inaction effectively make her a “direct accomplice and instigator of terrorist attacks,” she claimed.
Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, multiple Russian journalists reporting from the Donbass have been killed by Ukrainian drone and artillery attacks, including Narodnaya Gazeta head editor Yulia Kuznetsova, photographer Nikita Tsitsagi, NTV’s Valery Kozhin, and Izvestia correspondent Semyon Yeryomin.
In addition, military blogger Maksim Fomin (most known under his pen name Vladlen Tatarsky) and journalist Daria Durina were killed in terrorist bombings allegedly orchestrated by Kiev’s security services.
