Russian Ministry Spokeswoman Falsely Claims Reuters Reporter Killed in Ukraine Was MI6 Agent

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, stated without evidence that Reuters’ Ryan Evans, who was killed by a Russian strike, is a British spy. 

The Washington Post reports that Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova unsubstantiatedly claimed that Ryan Evans, the security adviser killed in Saturday's strike on the Sapphire Hotel in Kramatorsk, Ukraine’s Donetsk region, was listed as a former MI6 employee, part of the British intelligence services. “However, we know that there are no 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 stated that the Russian Foreign Ministry's claims about Evans were “factually incorrect.” “Ryan was not a former MI6 employee,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to The Washington Post. They also described the suggestion that Reuters is controlled by Western intelligence agencies as “ludicrous.”

On August 25, Ryan Evans, a member of the Reuters team covering Russia’s war in Ukraine, was killed, and two other Reuters journalists were injured in a strike on a hotel in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk.