Russian Drone Killed two Ukrainian Journalists & Wounded Another in the Eastern Ukrainian City of Kramatorsk
Ukraine: Two journalists from the Ukrainian foreign service FREEDOM TV were killed and another injured in an attack by a Russian Lancet attack drone in the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region.
FREEDOM Media reported on Thursday that its war correspondent, 43-year-old Olena Gramova (Gubanova), and 33-year-old cameraman, Yevgen Karmazin, were killed in the drone strike.
The Russian drone struck the journalists' car at a petrol station in the industrial city at 9:37 a.m. on October 23, 2025. Another journalist, Alexander Kolychev, injured in the attack, has been hospitalized.
According to the AFP news agency, the Donetsk regional governor first detailed the attack and posted photos of the charred remains of the journalists' car.
Olena Gramova (Gubanova), a journalist from the Donetsk region, was a native of Yenakiieve. She left her job as a finance expert to become a voice of her region. She turned to journalism in 2014. That same year, Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and began arming a separatist movement in Donetsk and Luhansk, Donbas.
Since 2021, Olena Gramova has been working as a war correspondent for Ukraine's state-run foreign broadcasting channels. From the early days of the large-scale invasion, she has been at the most critical locations in Donbas. In 2023, Olena Gramova was awarded the Order of Princess Olga, 3rd Degree.
In its statement, FREEDOM said, "Olena Gramova worked tirelessly at the most critical locations in the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, revealing to the world the truth about how the Russian army is destroying her native Donetsk region. She stayed in Kramatorsk to show the people there what they are going through."
Cameraman Yevhen Karmazin, born in Kramatorsk, Donetsk, had been working for Ukrainian foreign television channels since 2021. "He was there from day one, covering evacuations, war crimes, and soldiers' stories," the Kyiv Post wrote on X.
Kramatorsk, with a pre-war population of approximately 150,000, is one of the few remaining civilian centers in the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control.
A high-ranking Ukrainian press official commented to the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU): "This is the reality of drone warfare. There is no safe place left in Kramatorsk. There is no safe place along the entire contact line." Russian UAVs are hunting journalists, volunteers, and rescue workers, going as far as 20-30 kilometers into the interior.
