Russian journalists among six reported killed in Ukrainian rocket attack 

A Ukrainian rocket attack killed six people, including three Russian state media workers, in eastern Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Luhansk region, according to Russian news organisations and officials.

The attack on Monday killed war correspondent Alexander Fedorchak, a journalist from Russia’s main pro-Kremlin Izvestia newspaper, as well as a camera operator, Andrei Panov, who worked for Russian television channel Zvezda, and the channel’s driver, Alexander Sirkeli, the Moscow-appointed governor of the Luhansk region, Leonid Pasechnik, said.

Pasechnik said a 14-year-old child was also killed in the attack in the region’s Kremina district.

Izvestia said Fedorchak had entered the Luhansk region – most of which has been captured by invading Russian forces – after reporting from the Kupiansk area in the neighbouring Kharkiv region, one of the areas where Russian forces have made advances against Ukraine’s troops in recent months.

“Izvestia correspondent Alexander Fedorchak was killed in the zone of the special military operation,” the newspaper said, using Moscow’s term for its war on Ukraine.

Russia’s state-controlled English-language RT outlet posted an image of Fedorchak on social media, saying only that the war correspondent’s “circumstances of death” are “not clear yet”.

Izvestia said that its correspondent was killed “in the Kupiansk direction” – a city that has been under intense Russian attack and where Russian forces have been advancing.

“His last report was broadcast literally the day before,” Izvestia said on its website.

The Zvezda channel – which is sponsored by Moscow’s Ministry of Defence – later said that its correspondent, Nikita Goldin, had also been seriously wounded in the attack, which it described as a strike on a civilian vehicle.

Ukrainian officials have yet to comment on the Russian claims that the journalists were targeted.

Russian news agencies quoted security sources as saying the attack had been carried out by advanced HIMARS rockets, which have been supplied to Ukraine by the United States.

Alexander Miroshnik, an ambassador-at-large for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said there was evidence the journalists had been deliberately targeted.

“More and more details are emerging of the killing of these guys that point to the premeditated and terrorist nature of the strike on journalists and people alongside them,” he wrote on Telegram.

Figures from the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine show that 18 Ukrainian and foreign reporters have been killed on assignment since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Another 10 journalists have been killed by bombs or shelling while not at work. More than 80 media employees have been killed while serving in the Ukrainian military.

Alexander Martemyanov, a freelance reporter working for Izvestia, was killed in Ukraine in January.

Fighting has been particularly intense in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas area – made up of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions – where Russian forces have concentrated on capturing more territory from Ukraine after an initial drive failed to reach the capital Kyiv in the early stages of the war.