Russian journalist Oksana Baulina killed in shelling incident in Kyiv
By Uliana Pavlova and Brian Stelter, CNN
A Russian journalist working for the independent news site The Insider was killed in a shelling incident in Kyiv, the outlet said in a statement on Wednesday.
Oksana Baulina had been filming the shelling destruction in the capital’s Podilskyi District by Russian troops when she came under rocket fire. Another civilian died with her, The Insider’s statement said. Two people accompanying her were also wounded and hospitalized.
Baulina went to Ukraine as a correspondent and filed “several reports” from Lviv and Kyiv, The Insider said.
“The Insider expresses its deepest condolences to Oksana’s family and friends,” the outlet said in the statement. “We will continue to cover the war in Ukraine, including such Russian war crimes as indiscriminate shelling of residential areas where civilians and journalists are killed.”
The Insider’s statement did not say when Baulina was killed. But soon after it was released, colleagues took to Twitter to mourn her death.
Baulina was a “journalist with a phenomenal sense of moral clarity,” former colleague Alexey Kovalyov said in a Twitter post.
Prior to joining the outlet, Baulina worked as a producer for the Anti-Corruption Foundation founded by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, according to The Insider, which added that “after the organization was listed as an extremist organization, she had to leave Russia in order to continue reporting on Russian government corruption for The Insider.”
Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh called Baulina a “courageous and honest, excellent journalist.” “[S]he was our steadfast upstander and would always help,” Yarmysh said. “I don’t even know how to speak about her death and can’t even imagine all of this.”
Christo Grozev, an investigative reporter at Bellingcat, called her “an amazingly brave Russian journalist” who was “killed by her own country’s army shelling civilian areas in the Podol district in Kyiv.”
“She was killed while reporting on the damage caused by the shelling,” Grozev added on Twitter.
Baulina is the fifth journalist killed in Ukraine this month, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and other press freedom activists.
Gulnoza Said, the committee’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator said Baulina’s death is “another demonstration of the cruelty of Russia’s war on Ukraine.”
Multiple news crews have come under fire while covering the war. Filmmaker Brent Renaud was killed outside Kyiv on March 13. His colleague Juan Arredondo was seriously injured. Arredondo wrote on Instagram earlier this week that “five surgeries in, I have a long way to recovery.”
The next day, two members of a Fox News crew, Oleksandra Kuvshynova and Pierre Zakrzewski, were killed. Correspondent Benjamin Hall was severely injured.
At the beginning of the month, a Ukrainian camera operator, Yevhenii Sakun, was killed when a television tower was shelled in Kyiv, according to CPJ.
“Ukrainian and Russian authorities must do everything in their power to ensure the safety of journalists and all other civilians, and to thoroughly investigate attacks on members of the press,” the group said.
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