A Russian drone killed two Ukrainian journalists and wounded a colleague in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, an attack President Volodymyr Zelensky said followed a pattern of "deliberate" strikes targeting reporters.
Freedom Media, a Ukrainian state-funded news organisation, said their television crew had been hit by a Russian Lancet drone while in their car at a petrol station in the industrial city.
The news outlet, which publishes in Russian, named the killed journalists as 43-year-old Donetsk region native Olena Gramova and Yevgen Karmazin, 33, from Kramatorsk.
It added that another reporter, Alexander Kolychev, was hospitalised.
"These are not accidents or mistakes, but a deliberate Russian strategy to silence all independent voices reporting about Russia's war crimes in Ukraine," Zelensky wrote on social media.
The Donetsk regional governor announced details of the strike and posted images showing the charred remains of the journalists' car.
The proliferation of cheap but deadly drones used both by Russia and Ukraine has made reporting from frontline regions dangerous and unpredictable.
Thursday's attack comes after a Russian state media correspondent was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in the Moscow-occupied part of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region.
Earlier this month, French photojournalist Antoni Lallican was killed on assignment near the frontline in Donetsk region.
Several journalists have been killed covering the war since Russia invaded in 2022, though precise tolls vary according to different monitors.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Lallican was the 14th journalist killed by Russia's army, while UNESCO said he was at least the 23rd media worker to have been killed on both sides of the front line.
Among them was AFP video journalist Arman Soldin, killed outside Kramatorsk in the nearby town of Chasiv Yar in May 2023, aged 32.
RSF called for an speedy investigation into Thursday's strike, in comments to AFP.
The general prosecutor's office meanwhile condemned the Russian attack and said that Moscow's forces had killed five civilians in the nearby village of Zvanivka several days earlier, citing an eyewitness.
Kramatorsk, which had a pre-war population of around 150,000 people, is one of the few remaining civilian hubs in Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control.
Russian forces are about 16 kilometres (10 miles) from the city, where officials this month announced the mandatory evacuation of children from some parts of the town and outlying villages.
Kremlin-supported separatists in 2014 captured Kramatorsk before being pushed back by Ukrainian forces.
