Moscow pledges punishment for murders of Russian journalists
The Ukrainian authorities are conducting a “targeted hunt” on Russian journalists and war correspondents and will be punished for these deaths, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday.
The diplomat made the remarks on a day of commemoration for reporters and technicians who lost their lives while performing professional duties.
“On this day, we remember those who did not return from editorial assignments from hot spots, who died for their convictions and loyalty to their profession, including as a result of terrorist attacks, who, risking their lives, honestly fulfilled their journalistic duty and defended the truth until the last moment, and freedom of speech,” Zakharova said in a statement.
She attributed Kiev’s deliberate attacks on Russian media workers to years of “connivance and encouragement” of such “terrorist methods” by Western authorities and structures under their control, “whose direct responsibility is to protect the safety of media workers without any distinction.”
Zakharova recalled the latest UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay’s safety report on media workers, which ignored the killing and oppression of Russian reporters.
“We will never agree with such a double-faced approach and will continue to seek from relevant international structures, including UNESCO and its director general, that they conscientiously and impartially fulfill their responsibilities,” the diplomat stated.
The report, covering 2022 and 2023, claimed that 162 journalists, media workers, and social media producers had been killed over the indicated period. The publication mentioned the killings of only two Russian media workers since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict.
In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin estimated that at least 30 Russian journalists had been killed in the line of duty since the Ukraine conflict flared up in 2022.
A number of prominent public figures and entities, including the Russian Union of Journalists, Moscow’s ambassador to UNESCO, Rinat Alyautdinov and TASS Deputy Director-General Mikhail Gusman have slammed the report as unacceptable, describing it as a source of disinformation.
RT joined the uproar by sending a letter to Azoulay that denounced the document and listed a number of incidents that had been omitted, including assassination plots against RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
UNESCO’s report was eventually dismissed at the organization’s session on Friday after Russia and several other countries protested the document.
Among the journalists murdered by the Kiev regime in 2022-2023 are Boris Maksudov, who worked for Russia 24 TV, RIA Novosti’s Rostislav Zhuravlev, Tavria TV’s Oleg Klokov, RuBaltic’s Aleksey Ilyashevich, military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, and journalist Darya Dugina.
Zakharova also mentioned more recent deaths, such as that of the Russian news photographer Nikita Tsitsagi, who was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in June, cameraman Valery Kozhin, who was also murdered this summer, and Izvestia correspondent Semyon Yeryomin, who lost his life in Zaporozhye Region in a Ukrainian drone attack in April.
