Oksana Baulina speaks after a live broadcast in Moscow on May 16, 2017. (Pavel Golovkin/AP)
By Meryl Kornfield and Brittany Shammas
A correspondent with a Russian news outlet was killed while reporting on shelling in Kyiv, her outlet said, marking at least the fifth journalist to die covering the war in Ukraine. Oksana Baulina died while filming the destruction from Russian shelling of a district within the Ukrainian capital, the Insider, an independent Russian news site, confirmed Wednesday, leading to an outpouring from other journalists who spoke of Baulina’s persistence and selflessness.
Baulina was “an amazingly brave Russian journalist,” tweeted Christo Grozev, an investigative reporter at Bellingcat, adding that she was “killed by her own country’s army shelling civilian areas in the Podol district in Kyiv.”
There are few details about the strike that the Insider said killed the journalist: Her outlet said that a civilian also was killed, and that two others who accompanied Baulina were injured and hospitalized.
Baulina previously worked as a producer for the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which was founded by Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The organization was declared “extremist” last summer by a Moscow court, and Baulina “had to leave Russia in order to continue reporting on Russian government corruption for The Insider,” the news site said.
As a war correspondent in Ukraine, she filed reports from Lviv and Kyiv, sharing her last update shortly before her death about Russian forces closing in on Kyiv.
“The Insider expresses its deepest condolences to Oksana’s family and friends,” the outlet said. “We will continue to cover the war in Ukraine, including such Russian war crimes as indiscriminate shelling of residential areas which result in the deaths of civilians and journalists.”
Before Baulina’s death was reported, the Committee to Protect Journalists had counted four journalists killed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.