Ukrainian Photojournalist Killed by Separatist Mortar Fire near Donetsk
KYIV – A photographer with Ukraine’s Segodnya newspaper, Sergiy Nikolayev, was killed on the weekend in a mortar attack by pro-Russian separatists against positions of Kyiv’s military forces in eastern Ukraine, local media reported Sunday.
Bogdan Rossinski, another photographer who was wounded in the same attack on Saturday in the town of Peski, near Donetsk, told Segodnya that they were surprised by the mortar attack, in which the 43-year-old Nikolayev was fatally wounded.
Nikolayev was still alive when he was taken to a local hospital but doctors could not save his life.
Ukrainian authorities have opened an investigation to clarify the circumstances of the attack they called “premeditated murder.”
Ukraine, along with Syria and Iraq, in 2014 became the most dangerous country in the world to be a reporter, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Nikolayev is the sixth media worker to die in eastern Ukraine in less than a year in a conflict which broke out last April after the pro-Russian rebellion in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, both of which border on Russia.