Published: May 24, 2026 12:29 pm
Author: RT
Reporters from BBC and CNN declined to take part in the trip, the Foreign Ministry has said
Footage by RT has shows foreign journalists touring the site of the deadly Ukrainian drone attack on a college dorm in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic.
Ukraine targeted a teacher training college dormitory in the town of Starobelsk with several waves of UAVs on Friday, killing 21 people, mostly teenage girls, and injuring 60 others.
Russian Foreign Ministry arranged a trip to Starobelsk on Sunday for more than 50 foreign journalists from 19 countries: Austria, Brazil, UK, Hungary, Venezuela, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, Qatar, China, Cuba, Lebanon, UAE, Pakistan, the US, Turkey, Finland, and France, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
BBC and CNN rejected an invitation to visit the site of the attack, while Japan’s government explicitly banned Japanese reporters from making the trip, she added.
Russia’s newly appointed human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, who also arrived in Starobelsk, said that Western mainstream media outlets “are simply afraid to see the truth. They just don’t want to see or hear it.”
Those of their colleagues who accepted the offer to visit the site of the terrorist attack will see for themselves that there are no military facilities nearby, she said.
The foreign journalists will also realize that claims of the drones hitting the dorm after being shot down by Russian air defenses are false, the commissioner insisted. It’s “absolutely impossible” for 16 UAVs to hit the same building after being intercepted, she explained.
What happened in Starobelsk was a “deliberate killing of children” by Ukraine, Lantratova stressed.
A correspondent for China’s Phoenix Television, Lu Yuguang, told RT that he hasn’t seen even a hint of any military facilities in the vicinity of the dorm.
Giovanni Pigni, from Italian newspaper La Stampa, told TASS that what he saw in Starobelsk is “horrible.”
“The destruction is so immense… I just see that there was a college here and that people have died,” he said.
On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry reported carrying out a large-scale strike against military targets in Ukraine in response to the terrorist attacks by Kiev.
READ MORE: Oreshnik strike a retaliation for Kiev’s ‘terrorist attacks’ – Moscow
The Russian response, which involved the intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik system and other types of missiles and drones, targeted command centers of the Ukrainian ground forces and military intelligence, air bases, and defense industry enterprises, the ministry said.
