Russian war correspondent Aleksandr Korobov has been hospitalized after an apparent targeted attack on him by Kiev's forces, the regional broadcaster GTRK Belgorod confirmed on Monday.
The statement came after Ukraine claimed that its agents had ambushed Korobov in Belgorod and fatally injured him.
“He is in a hospital,” GTRK Belgorod chief Nadezhda Vlasova said in a comment, adding that the journalist had been “injured” in an unspecified incident. She denied Kiev’s claim that Korobov had died.
The news website Lenta.ru cited sources as saying that Korobov had been hospitalized with a head injury.
According to local media, Korobov frequently covered the shelling of Russia’s Belgorod Region by Ukrainian troops, as well as the fighting in Donbass. Apart from working for the Russia-1 TV channel, he produced reports for Zvezda, a channel run by the Russian Defense Ministry.
On Monday, the Ukrainian military intelligence service HUR claimed that Korobov “had his skull fractured” and “succumbed to his injuries.” The agency published a 30-second video of a man walking on a street with his face not visible. The same clip later shows a man, who' face is blurred out in the video, lying on the ground.
The HUR accused Korobov of “producing false reports about the war and personally participating in grave war crimes against Ukraine.”
“Every war crime there will be followed by a just retribution,” HUR said in a statement on its website.
The Russian authorities have not yet commented on the incident. RT could not independently verify the video released by HUR.
Several Russian journalists have been killed while covering the conflict in Ukraine, leading Moscow to accuse Kiev’s forces of deliberately targeting the press.
Last month, Evgeny Poddubny, a veteran war correspondent for Russia-1, was injured when a Ukrainian kamikaze drone struck his car. The strike occurred as Poddubny was covering the Ukrainian incursion in Russia’s Kursk Region. He was discharged from a hospital on September 13.