MOSCOW, July 11./ITAR-TASS/. Russian journalists, including reporters of the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily, came under fire in Luhansk on Friday, a Rossiiskaya Gazeta observer, Yuri Snegiryov, who is in the city, said.

When he was walking at a (railway) station, a mortar round struck a place ten metres close to him. There were eight or ten strikes, he said on Russia 24 television.

It was mortar fire from the side of Avangard stadium. The target was not reporters, the correspondent said, noting the reporters were doing their duty.

 

Casualties among Russian journalists

At least three Russian journalists covering developments in Ukraine’s embattled southeastern regions were killed in June. The most recent tragic death of a Russian reporter came on Sunday night.

Anatoly Klyan, 68, was among other journalists on a bus with mothers of military conscripts going to a pro-Kiev military unit in the Donetsk Region to demand the return of their sons, when the vehicle came under gunfire. Klyan, who worked as a cameraman for Russian state-run television broadcaster Channel One, sustained a lethal gun wound in the abdomen and died after his hospitalization.

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. The journalists had clearly visible PRESS marks at the moment of the attack. According to eyewitnesses, a mortar shell exploded near the Russian filming crew.