The Kremlin neither denied nor admitted Russian responsibility for a missile attack on a hotel hosting foreign journalists in Kramatorsk, Eastern Ukraine, on August 24.
The strike killed Ryan Evans, a safety adviser for a Reuters news agency crew, and injured two Reuters journalists and other reporters at the scene.
Reuters said it is investigating the strike to find out who was behind the attack and whether it was deliberate.
Ukrainian officials said Russia hit the hotel with an Iskander-M ballistic missile, causing damage to private residences and businesses.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov downplayed the significance of the attack, arguing Russia does not target civilians and that Evans was not a journalist.
“I read information from the agency staff that he was not a journalist, but some kind of security advisor. I repeat once again: strikes are carried out on military infrastructure, or facilities in one way or another related to military infrastructure.”
That is false.
International humanitarian law and the law of warfare protect all members of press crews regardless of their roles.
The United Nations Geneva Convention’s Article 79 states that press crews working in conflict zones are considered civilians and protected from any type of hostilities. Protocol 1 of that law specifies that holding a press ID card “attests to the status of its holder as a journalist.”
While formally not a journalist, Evans was a member of a Reuters news crew and had been employed by the agency since 2022. He was entitled to the same protections as other civilians under international law, which also forbids directly targeting civilian objects.
Press watchdogs say Russia has a well-documented history of systematic attacks on civilian structures housing foreign journalists in Ukraine.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said more than 100 Ukrainian and international journalists “have been victims of violence” since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
RSF said it has documented 53 events, in which 121 journalists have been victims, that could be classified as war crimes. Those attacks include the targeting of 14 TV towers and media infrastructure.
RSF has filed eight war complaints “about Russian war crimes against journalists in Ukraine” with the International Criminal Court and the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, and two complaints with French courts.
Not including Evans, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented the deaths of at least 15 journalists and media workers covering the war, and numerous attacks resulting in injury.
Russia has repeatedly targeted hotels and other civilian establishments frequented by journalists.
That includes a January 10 Russian missile attack on the Kharkiv Palace Hotel, in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, that injured 11 people, including journalists.
The Kharkiv Palace Hotel manager told the German broadcaster ZDF, whose reporters were injured in the attack, that journalists were staying in 10 of the 15 rooms booked at the time of the strike.
In January, Ukraine’s National Union of Journalists documented Russian missile attacks on hotels in Zaporizhzhia, Pokrovsk and Kharkiv popular among local and international journalists, calling it “a deliberate tactic of intimidation of the media people in order to limit coverage of the war in the international media.”
On June 27, 2023, Russia launched a missile attack on Ria Lounge, a restaurant in Kramatorsk regularly frequented by aid workers and journalists, killing 13 and wounding 61. Among the dead was Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator.
Russia’s attacks on journalists fit into its longstanding and systematic targeting of civilians and civilian areas, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called “missile terror.”
Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said the Russian military “systematically hunted down” journalists who stayed in Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine.
Moscow has likewise sought to control the narrative following Ukraine’s surprise August 6 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Russia has opened criminal cases against at least seven journalists who have reported from Kursk, stating, falsely, they illegally crossed the border into Russia.
