A Reuters staff member is missing and others were injured after a hotel in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, was hit by a Russian strike on Saturday night. The news agency had a six-person crew staying at the hotel as part of its team covering the war in Ukraine.
The strike on Saturday killed at least one person and injured several, according to local officials. The US State Department said an American citizen was among those injured but did not identify the person.
Rescuers uncovered the body of one man under the rubble, the head of Kramatorsk City’s military administration, Oleksandr Honcharenko, said in an update on Sunday afternoon. He did not give further details or identify the body.
The injured journalists include citizens of Ukraine, the United States, Latvia, and Germany, according to the head of Donetsk regional military administration, Vadym Filashkin.
The Reuters crew managed to file video on Sunday morning of the extensive damage done to the hotel, showing emergency services searching through huge piles of rubble with torches. Footage filmed inside the hotel showed several destroyed hotel rooms.
The video also showed extensive damage to the hotel’s roof. Kramatorsk has often been the target of Russian shelling since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine in February 2022. It remains one of the largest cities under Ukrainian control in the country’s besieged east.
In April last year, Russian forces carried out a missile strike on Kramatorsk’s railway station that was being used to shelter civilians fleeing the fighting. More than 50 people, including several children, died in that one attack, which was called “an apparent war crime” by Human Rights Watch and SITU Research.
