(Reuters) – A star journalist with a Russian state media group was killed while attending a shooting training exercise in Crimea on Friday, regional officials and Russian state media said.
Svetlana Babaeva headed the office of the Rossiya Segodnia group in Simferopol, the administrative capital of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea annexed by Russia in 2014.
The RIA Novosti news agency, which is part of the group like the radio station The Voice of Russia (formerly Radio Moscow), indicated that the journalist had been the victim of a “stray bullet”. She provided no further details.
Several pro-Kremlin officials paid tribute to Svetlana Babaeva. “She has done a tremendous job of telling the truth about what is happening in the Kherson region,” said Vladimir Saldo, the official installed by Moscow at the head of the Ukrainian region partially occupied by the Russian army.
The Kyiv government has imposed sanctions on the Rossiya Segodnia group, describing its chief executive Dmitry Kiselev as a “central figure in propaganda for the deployment of Russian troops in Ukraine”.
Dmitri Kisselev testified on social networks of his affection for Svetlana Babaïeva, as did the spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova.
The journalist had previously headed the RIA Novosti bureau in Britain and the United States.
(Written by Reuters, French version Tangi Salaün)
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