The international community’s failure to respond to the killings of Russian journalists by Ukraine is inexcusable, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.
On Monday, three members of a Russian news crew were killed in a Ukrainian attack while reporting from the Lugansk People’s Republic.
The incident marked the latest in a series of deaths of Russian media workers since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.
“We constantly draw the attention of the international community to acts of assault, intimidation, attacks, and attempted murders of journalists in the conflict zone. We consider the reaction of the international community to have been extremely inadequate. Many simply refuse to respond, which…is inexcusable,” Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.
The attack claimed the lives of Aleksandr Fedorchak, a reporter for the newspaper Izvestia, Andrey Panov, a cameraman for Zvezda TV, and Aleksandr Sirekli, their driver. Their vehicle, marked as press transport, was reportedly struck by two missiles fired from a US-supplied Ukrainian HIMARS multiple rocket launcher system.
The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Ukrainian forces of terrorism. Russia’s human rights ombudswoman, Tatyana Moskalkova, said that she would seek condemnation of Kiev’s actions from international organizations.
According to Peskov, “The fire was precision-guided. [The Ukrainians] specifically wanted to kill [the journalists]. The Kiev regime continues its atrocities…against [unarmed] journalists. This is the essence of the Kiev regime,” Peskov added.
Earlier this year, another Izvestia journalist, Alexander Martemianov, was killed in a Ukrainian drone attack in the Donetsk People’s Republic.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has demanded that international organizations such as UNESCO, the OSCE, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights respond to Kiev’s “continuing effort to kill Russian media staff in cold blood.”
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, more than 30 Russian journalists have been killed in the conflict zone since 2022.
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UNESCO bars Russian journalists from free speech session
In November, Russia accused UNESCO of failing to include deadly Ukrainian attacks on Russian journalists in its latest biannual report covering the global state of journalist safety in 2022-23.
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