Two Ukrainian journalists were killed by a Russian drone in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Thursday in an attack described by Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman as a war crime.
Donetsk region governor Vadym Filashkin identified the journalists as Olena Hubanova and Yevhen Karmazin from Ukraine’s state-funded Freedom television channel. The channel, which broadcasts in Russian, confirmed their deaths and said they were in a car at a petrol station at the time of the strike.
Filashkin said they were hit by a Lancet, a costly and powerful drone often used against tanks and armoured vehicles.
“This tragedy is further evidence of Russia’s systemic war crimes against civilians,” human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets wrote on Telegram.
The general prosecutor’s office said a colleague of the two journalists had also been wounded and that it had opened a war crime investigation. It posted a photo of a destroyed red car and an image of two flak jackets marked “press” in the boot.
Hussam al-Masri, the Reuters journalist killed by Israeli fire in Gaza
At least 20 journalists have been reported killed in the combat zone since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
In early October, a French photojournalist was killed and his Ukrainian colleague badly wounded by a drone strike near the town of Druzhkivka, just south of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The European Federation of Journalists said that attack had been the first in which a journalist had been killed by a drone in Ukraine.
A war correspondent for Russia’s RIA news agency was killed last week and another wounded in a Ukrainian drone strike in the Russian-occupied part of southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, the state-run agency said.
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