KIEV: A Russian state television reporter was killed yesterday during a fierce battle in Ukraine’s separatist east that put Kiev’s tattered relations with Moscow under further strain.
The chief doctor at the main hospital in the rebel stronghold city of Lugansk said Russia’s VGTRK media group reporter Igor Kornelyuk sustained severe stomach wounds after being hit by shrapnel.
“He was unconscious when he arrived and died on his way to the operating room,” doctor Fedir Solyanyk said by telephone. A Lugansk separatist spokesman said that Kornelyuk and VGTRK sound technician Anton Voloshin were caught in the middle of a grenade launcher attack staged by Ukranian forces in the Russian border region.
The separatist spokesman said the fate of Voloshin and that of about 15 rebel fighters who were with the Russian television crew at the time remained unclear.
Ukrainian security officials said they would comment only after conducting a full investigation. But Russia’s foreign ministry immediately denounced the reporter’s death as a “crime” committed by Ukrainian forces that it expected global media to condemn.
Kornelyuk’s death is the second confirmed fatality of a reporter in eastern Ukraine since fighting there broke out in mid-April.
Italian photographer Andrea Rocchelli and his Russian assistant Andrei Mironov were killed outside Slavyansk in the neighbouring Donetsk region in late May. The 10-week pro-Russian uprising has threatened the survival of the economically teetering ex-Soviet nation and put East-West relations under pressure not witnessed since the Cold War.
The Kremlin has denied fomenting the unrest. But its March seizure of Crimea and border troop movements were followed by a gas cut that Kiev called “another stage of Russia’s aggression against the Ukrainian state”.
Kiev’s increasingly hostile view of Moscow was in full display on when a vital pipeline used to transport Siberian gas to Europe exploded in a spectacular fireball that sent up a 30-metre flame.
The Trans-Siberian Pipeline blast appeared to have been caused by the loss of pressure in a seal in a section of the link running through a northeastern part of Ukraine that has not been affected by the fighting.
AFP
