RT crew narrowly escapes deadly Ukrainian drone strike on journalists

Kiev’s forces targeted a civilian car on Saturday, killing Izvestia reporter Alexander Martemyanov
An RT crew narrowly avoided a Ukrainian drone strike in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic that claimed the life of Russian war correspondent Alexander Martemyanov. The Izvestia journalist was targeted while traveling in a civilian vehicle on Saturday. RT correspondent Roman Kosarev revealed that the team had worked alongside Martemyanov just hours before the fatal incident.
Kosarev and the Izvestia reporter were both recording “yet another atrocity” at the scene of a Ukrainian cluster munition strike on a residential area in the Donbass town of Gorlovka on Saturday, Kosarev told RT's Eunan O’Neill on Saturday.
“They attacked the city of Gorlovka with cluster shells and ten people were wounded. Alexander and I and other reporters were on the scene recording everything that happened,” Kosarev said. “Mind you, there was not a single military site in vision,” he added.
“This is not something out of the ordinary in the city of Gorlovka, because every single day since the start of the new year, there were civilian casualties.”
Shortly before leaving the scene, they spoke about the best routes to take to avoid potential Ukrainian attacks, Kosarev said.
“He was advising me on which route to take best to get out of Gorlovka and move on to Donetsk,” he said, adding that he did not listen to the advice and took his own route. Just hours later, Kosarev found out that Martemyanov was killed by a Ukrainian drone, and at least four other reporters traveling with him were wounded.
Martemyanov had been reporting from the Donbass since 2014, and persisted despite being severely wounded in the line of work in 2023, Kosarev said.
“He returned to our duty to cover the truth, to cover everything that's going on here in the Donbass, just like it had since 2014, since the very beginning of the Ukrainian aggression,” the RT correspondent said.
Moscow has condemned the drone strike that murdered Martemyanov as an act of terrorism. This “deliberate murder of a Russian journalist is yet another brutal crime in the list of [Kiev’s] bloody atrocities,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday. She slammed Western watchdog organizations for turning a blind eye to Ukrainian war crimes.
The attack which took Martemyanov’s life was the latest in a number of cases in which Kiev’s forces have killed Russian journalists reporting from the conflict in Ukraine.