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An Izvestia correspondent was killed on January 4 in Donbass and four other journalists injured during a Ukrainian drone strike against their vehicle. The spokesperson for Russian diplomacy attributed responsibility for “this new brutal crime” by kyiv to the silence of UNESCO regarding these attacks targeting Russian journalists.
“The deliberate murder of Russian journalists is a new brutal crime in the series of bloody atrocities of the Zelensky regime, which openly resorts to terrorist methods to eliminate its ideological opponents,” criticized the spokesperson for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zakharova , in a press release published this January 5 on the Telegram channel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A message which follows a Ukrainian strike on January 4, carried out using a drone against their car traveling between Gorlovka and Donetsk, and in which several journalists were present. The correspondent ofIzvestia (freelance correspondent) Alexander Martemianov was killed. The Russian daily specified that the vehicle was traveling “far from the contact line”.
“There is no doubt that members of the media were deliberately targeted by this deadly attack,” denounced Maria Zakharova.
Four other journalists, Mikhail Kevkhiev and Maxim Romanenko of the RIA Novosti agency, as well as Isabella Lieberman and Svetlana Larine of the Bloknot Donetsk media outlet, were injured “to varying degrees,” said the Russian diplomat. “All those responsible for the crime against Russian journalists will be identified and will receive the deserved and inevitable punishment,” she assured.
A “politically biased line”
According to the spokesperson, “the idea of total impunity and permissiveness” enjoyed by the perpetrators of these Ukrainian attacks against Russian journalists is a “direct consequence of deliberate contempt” of international structures, such as the Office of the High Commissioner for United Nations for Human Rights, UNESCO and the OSCE.
“We demand that Audrey Azoulay [directrice générale de l’Unesco] respond appropriately to this new brutal murder of a Russian war correspondent, as required by the mandate entrusted to it,” the diplomat said. “We also expect an equally strong condemnation of this atrocity from all other human rights organizations and structures,” she continued. Their leaders “must directly designate the perpetrators of these murders,” she further stressed.
“The culmination of such a politically biased line on the part of multilateral institutions was the recent draft report of the Director-General of Unesco on the safety of journalists and the problem of impunity for crimes committed against them », also underlined Maria Zakharova, in reference to a draft report by Audrey Azoulay published on November 2, covering the period 2022–2023 and not including injured and killed Russian journalists.
“Although the approval of such a “report”, full of political distortions and statistical manipulations, was prevented, the leadership of Unesco and its head personally did not take a single step that would indicate a radical revision of this deeply flawed document and these bad practices,” continued the spokesperson for Russian diplomacy. Before accusing: “Thus, the head of the universal organization becomes the direct accomplice and instigator of terrorist attacks.”
On June 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared, during a meeting with heads of news agencies on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), that “at least 30” Russian journalists had been killed in Russia since the start of the conflict in Ukraine.
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