Russia has claimed that the security adviser with the Reuters news agency who was killed when a missile struck a hotel in eastern Ukraine last week was a British spy, linking his death to Moscow’s assertion that foreign mercenaries are involved in Ukraine’s attack on the Kursk region.
Announcing at a press briefing Wednesday that security adviser Ryan Evans, 38, was killed in a strike Saturday on the Sapphire Hotel in the city of Kramatorsk, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed without evidence that he was registered as a former employee of MI6, an arm of the British secret services. “But we are well aware that there are not former MI6 employees,” she said.
“This directly proves that Western intelligence agencies literally direct the mass media they control to carry out anti-Russian information campaigns. This has nothing to do with journalism, you see,” she continued, claiming that “other foreign mercenaries were eliminated” in the strike.
A Reuters spokesperson said in a statement that the Russian Foreign Ministry was “factually incorrect” in its allegations about Evans. “Ryan was not a former MI6 employee,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to The Washington Post, adding, “it is ludicrous to suggest that Reuters is under the control of Western intelligence agencies.”
Evans was a former British soldier who had worked for the Reuters news agency since 2022, and was staying at the Sapphire Hotel as part of a six-person team, Reuters said in an earlier statement. Evans had also worked as a security adviser for the agency in Israel and Paris.
Two other Reuters journalists were injured in the strike, alongside five others, when a Russian Iskander missile hit the building, partially destroying it.
Numerous journalists have been killed or wounded during the years-long Ukraine conflict. News outlets often enlist safety advisers with military backgrounds in a bid to protect their correspondents in war zones. The eastern Donetsk region has experienced some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict because of its location near the front line. Journalists sometimes embed there with combat units, within miles of Russian forces.
Earlier this week, the Kremlin asserted that Russia only strikes military infrastructure in Ukraine - a claim that appears to be false, as Moscow continues to strike critical infrastructure, schools, hospitals, shops and residential buildings.
“I’ll repeat once again: [Russian] strikes are carried out against military infrastructure objects and/or against targets related to military infrastructure in one way or another,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call when asked about the strike on the hotel. Peskov did not say whether he included security advisers who protect journalists in the military category.
On Wednesday, the ministry also banned 92 additional U.S. citizens from entering Russian territory, including journalists from The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
A statement by the ministry said the ban list had been drawn up in response to “the Russophobic course pursued by the Biden administration” and includes business leaders, scientists, cultural figures, journalists and editors.
“We remind the current U.S. authorities of the inevitability of punishment for hostile actions, whether we are talking about directly encouraging [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and his henchmen to commit acts of aggression and terrorist attacks or attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Russian Federation,” read the statement.
