A French journalist was killed Monday during a Russian bombardment that struck a vehicle evacuating civilians from eastern Ukraine, French and Ukrainian officials said.
“Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff was in Ukraine to show the reality of war,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter.
“Aboard a humanitarian bus, alongside civilians forced to flee to escape Russian bombs, he was fatally shot.”
The 32-year-old reporter was working for BFM TV and was on his second Ukraine reporting trip since the war began on February 24, according to the French news station.
He was near Severodonetsk, a city in Ukraine’s east that has been pounded by advancing Russian troops in recent weeks, the French and Ukrainian foreign ministries said in separate statements.
French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, who visited Kyiv on Monday, said on Twitter that Leclerc-Imhoff had been killed “by a Russian bombardment of a humanitarian mission while he was carrying out his duty to inform”.
“I have spoken with the government of Lugansk and asked President [Volodymyr] Zelensky for an inquiry, and they assured me of their help and support,” she wrote.
The French foreign ministry has called for a “transparent inquiry” into the circumstances of his death. Later on Monday, French anti-terrorism prosecutors said they would open an investigation into possible war crimes in relation to the incident.
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