Reuters mourns the death of one of its collaborators killed in a strike in the east

Reuters is sad. A security adviser working with some of its journalists was killed on Saturday in a missile attack on a hotel in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, the news agency said on Sunday.

Ryan Evans was “part of a Reuters team staying at the Sapphire Hotel in Kramatorsk (…) when it was hit by a missile attack,” Company X said, saying it was “devastated” by the news. “Two of our journalists are in hospital; One is being treated for serious injuries,” Reuters added, adding that three colleagues were unhurt.

Zelensky denounced the Russian “terrorist state”.

Vadim Filachkin, the governor of the Ukrainian region of Donetsk (east), where most of the fighting is taking place, said the hotel in Kramatorsk was “targeted” by the Russian military. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the strike. “For all this, the world must not stop putting pressure on the terrorist state,” he said, referring to Russia. According to Governor Filachkin, the three victims were “citizens of Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom”.

Kramatorsk, the last major city in the Ukrainian-controlled Donbass, is located twenty kilometers west of the front line. Since the invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the pre-war city of around 150,000 people has come under repeated attacks by Russian forces.

A particularly deadly weekend

The attack followed a particularly deadly weekend in Ukraine and Russia, where at least 20 civilians were killed in multiple bombings in the past 24 hours. In Ukraine, 14 people were killed: seven in the Donetsk region and four in Sumy (in the north), according to local authorities. And on the Russian side, six people were killed in Ukrainian bombings in the Belgorod region during the night, announced Sunday Viatcheslav Gladkov, the governor of Kursk, the neighboring region of Kyiv, which has been attacked for more than two weeks.

Our file on the war in Ukraine

According to the NGO Reporters Without Borders, at least 11 journalists have been killed and 35 injured in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion.