(Reuters) -Russian war correspondent Ivan Zuyev was killed by a Ukrainian drone strike on Thursday while on assignment on the front line of the war in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, his publication, state news agency RIA said.
Zuyev’s colleague at the same agency, Yuri Voitkevich, was seriously wounded in the attack, RIA said.
Zuyev received numerous state awards for his reporting and RIA said Russian President Vladimir Putin had expressed his gratitude to him for his work earlier this year.
Members of the lower house of Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, praised Zuyev’s work. The head of the chamber’s International Affairs Committee, Leonid Slutsky, told RIA that the Ukrainian military was “consistently hunting down” Russian journalists.
French photojournalist Antoni Lallican was killed by a Russian drone earlier this month, the first instance in which a journalist had died in such a manner, the European Federation of Journalists said.
At least 18 journalists have died in the combat zone since Russia invaded its smaller neighbour in February 2022.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Alistair Bell)
