Comment by Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on the murder of Narodnaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Yulia Kuznetsova

On November 17, Narodnaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Yulia Kuznetsova died in the line of duty in the village of Bolshoye Soldatskoye, the Kursk Region, as a result of a targeted drone attack launched by armed militants of the Kiev regime. The Ukrainian Nazis dropped drone-carried munitions on a vehicle loaded with the newspaper’s archives. The ensuing blast also injured an e-typesetting operator of the newspaper and an accompanying police officer.

We express our sincere condolences to Ms Kuznetsova’s family and friends. She died while performing her professional duty. We wish her wounded colleagues a rapid recovery and convalescence. 

This cold-blooded murder is yet another example of the ugly and pathologically criminal nature of the Zelensky regime, which is ready to use bloody terrorist methods against civilians, civil services, and media personnel. Moreover, the Ukrainian Nazis have launched a real hunt for journalists covering frontline events. This year alone, they delivered targeted strikes that killed war correspondents Semyon Yeryomin, Valery Kozhin, and Nikita Tsitsagi, and heavily wounded Alexei Ivliyev and Yevgeny Poddubny. 

This series of cruel murders and attempts on the lives of Russian journalists is a direct consequence of the connivance tactics adopted by the Western patrons of the Nazi clique in Kiev and the deliberate hushing-up of these crimes by the relevant international organisations and human rights groups. Yet another eloquent example of this politically biased and profoundly immoral approach is the recently published draft report for 2022-2023 on media security and the impunity problem by UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay, a report that ignores the official Russian data on journalist deaths during that period.  This publication will undergo in-depth analysis at the 34th session of the Intergovernmental Council of the International Programme for the Development of Communication, scheduled for November 21-22.

Likewise, this hall of shame includes cynical statements by representatives of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). They claim that the lack of response to numerous crimes against Russian journalists from the High Commissioner and various special procedures under the UN Human Rights Council is due to Russia failing to provide access for them to confirm this data.   It is an outrage that this affected scrupulousness coincides with these and similar human rights mechanisms being involved in the large-scale misinformation campaigns unleashed by the West and its Ukrainian dependents against Russia, where any insinuations are instantly taken up by these “human rights activists” as evaluative judgments.  

We believe it is necessary to once again clarify the following. The “lack-of-access” allegations hold no water because the OHCHR’s official request to visit the Kursk Region was formulated in a provocative and politically biased manner. They wanted to investigate human rights violations “resulting from Ukraine’s response to the Russian armed aggression.”  There was not even a hint of an objective and unbiased approach. Worse still, the OHCHR conducts its “investigations” in keeping with a methodology of its own, where victims are asked leading questions that elicit responses desired by the Office.   

Currently, Russia’s competent authorities are carrying out an investigation to identify and bring to account, as prescribed by law, all Ukrainian militants implicated in Yulia Kuznetsova’s murder, which is classified as a terrorist attack.

We emphasise once again: all those guilty of murdering the Russian journalist will face well-deserved and unavoidable punishment.