MOSCOW, June 30. /ITAR-TASS/. A criminal case has been launched into the murder of a cameraman working for Russian television, who was shot dead in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Region late Sunday night, according to Vladimir Markin, spokesperson for Russia’s Investigative Committee.

Anatoly Klyan, 68, was among other journalists in a bus together with mothers of military conscripts going to a pro-Kiev military unit to demand the off-duty release of their sons, when the vehicle came under gunfire. Klyan, a cameraman for Russia’s TV Channel One, sustained a lethal gun wound in the abdomen and died upon his hospitalization.

“A staff member of the Russian television channel is another casualty at the hands of the Ukrainian authorities, who brutally ignore internationally accepted norms concerning the protection of peaceful citizens during armed conflicts,” Vladimir Markin said.

The spokesperson said the criminal case was launched on charges of warfare methods abuse and intended murder of a person carrying out professional duty. He added that the case would be summed up with earlier opened criminal cases in regard to the Ukrainian authorities’ actions during the ongoing military conflict in the country.

 

Other cases of violence against journalists in Ukraine

Klyan’s murder is another in a chain of lethal attacks on journalists in the ongoing combat operation, which Ukrainian authorities are conducting in southeast Ukraine.

Two correspondents from Russian central television and radio broadcasting company VGTRK, special correspondent Igor Kornelyuk and sound engineer Anton Voloshin, were killed near the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk on June 17.

They came under mortar fire near a roadblock of militia as they were filming a TV report about people’s militias helping to evacuate refugees from the combat zone. Journalists bore clearly visible media insignia at the moment of the attack. According to eyewitnesses, a mortar shell exploded near the Russian filming crew. Sound engineer Voloshin died at the scene and Kornelyuk died later at a local hospital.

On May 24, Italian photographer Andrea Rocchelli and his Russian interpreter Andrei Mironov were killed in mortar fire near the city of Sloviansk.

Hundreds of people have been killed, buildings have been destroyed and tens of thousands have been forced to cross the border from Ukraine to Russia as a result of Kiev’s military operation against federalization supporters in Ukraine’s southeast involving armored vehicles, heavy artillery and attack aviation.

June 20, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared a week-long ceasefire in the country’s embattled southeast and on Sunday he announced a three-day extension of the ceasefire. However, there have been numerous reports that the truce has been violated.