The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has said Kyiv believes it can kill journalists with impunity as Western-backed human rights organisations routinely ignore the Ukrainian war crimes in the ongoing war.
A group of Russian journalists was documenting an indiscriminate Ukrainian shelling of the Donbas town of Gorlovka on Saturday.
Their car was struck by a UAV as they were travelling back to the regional capital, Donetsk, killing one reporter named Aleksandr Martemyanov and wounding five other journalists.
According to one of the reporters, 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 has condemned the killing of the journalist and called it 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 added.
Zakharova strongly criticised international organisations, including the UN human rights body, for not addressing the crimes committed against the journalists.
She said it is sad to see that Kyiv enjoys impunity for its actions because of “international structures such as the UN OHCHR, UNESCO, and the OSCE for intentionally ignoring its crimes.”
The recent draft of ‘Report on the safety of journalists and 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.
Since the war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2022, multiple Russian journalists reporting from the war zone in Donbas have been killed by drones and artillery.
On one side, the incoming Trump government has promised swift action to end the war in Ukraine; on the other side, the outgoing US government has allowed arms sales to Ukraine to keep the war between the two neighbours going on.
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