Russian reporter killed in Ukraine fighting

KIEV: A Russian state television reporter was killed on Tuesday during a fierce battle in Ukraine’s separatist east that put Kiev’s tattered relations with Moscow under further strain.
The chief doctor at the main hospital in the rebel stronghold city of Lugansk said Russia’s VGTRK media group reporter Igor Kornelyuk sustained severe stomach wounds after being hit by shrapnel.
“He was unconscious when he arrived and died on his way to the operating room,” doctor Fedir Solyanyk told AFP by telephone.
A Lugansk separatist spokesman told AFP by telephone that Kornelyuk and VGTRK sound technician Anton Voloshin were caught in the middle of a grenade launcher attack staged by Ukranian forces in the Russian border region.
The separatist spokesman said the fate of Voloshin and that of about 15 rebel fighters who were with the Russian television crew at the time remained unclear.
Ukrainian security officials said they would comment only after conducting a full investigation.
But Russia’s Foreign Ministry immediately denounced the reporter’s death as a “crime” committed by Ukrainian forces that it expected global media to condemn.
Kornelyuk’s death is the second confirmed fatality of a reporter in eastern Ukraine since fighting there broke out in mid-April.
Italian photographer Andrea Rocchelli and his Russian assistant Andrei Mironov were killed outside Slavyansk in the neighboring Donetsk region in late May.