Two Ukrainian journalists of Freedom TV, Alyona Gramova and Evgeny Karmazin, were killed today by a Russian drone in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, as AFP was informed by their television network.

Freedom TV said they were killed while in a car at a gas station. The governor of the Donetsk region, for his part, released images of the charred remains of the journalists’ car.

A third journalist, Aleksandr Kolichev, was injured and taken to hospital, the broadcaster said.

Alyona Gramova, 43, “worked non-stop in the most dangerous places in Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, telling the world the truth about how the Russian army was destroying her hometown, Donetsk,” Ukraine’s Freedom TV said in a statement.

After starting her career in the financial industry, she turned to field journalism and has been working since 2021 for public Ukrainian networks.

Evgen Karmazin, 33, originally from Kramatorsk, has been a cameraman since 2022.

Kramatorsk, home to about 150,000 residents before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, is about 20 kilometers from the front line. It is one of the last cities in the Donetsk region that remains under Ukrainian control.

The proliferation of cheap drones used by Russian and Ukrainian forces has made reporting increasingly dangerous and unpredictable in the frontline areas of the conflict in Ukraine.

Last week, a journalist from the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in the Russian-held part of Zaporizhia region.

On October 3, French press photographer Anthony Lalican was killed by a Russian drone strike in eastern Ukraine and a Ukrainian colleague was injured.

The number of journalists who have been killed in Ukraine since the start of the war varies according to the sources.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in October that Antony Lalikan was the 14th journalist killed by the Russian military since February 2022. Unesco for its part lists at least 23 media professionals who have been killed in the line of duty on both sides of the front line.

Among them, AFP video journalist Armand Soldin, who was killed in Ukraine by a missile strike in 2023.