French photojournalist Antoni Lallican has been killed in a Russian drone strike in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian military has said.
Grigoriy Ivanchenko, a Ukrainian photojournalist working alongside Mr Lallican, was injured in the same attack on the outskirts of Komyshuvakha, a village in the Donetsk region.
The European and International Federations of Journalists (EFJ and IFJ) said this was the first instance of a journalist being killed by a drone in Ukraine.
Mr Lallican, a Paris-based photojournalist, had been documenting the war since March 2022 – a month after Russia launched its full-scale invasion – earning him the prestigious Victor Hugo Prize for photography in 2024.
The two journalists had been embedded with the 4th Mechanised Brigade near Komyshuvakha, around 15km (12 miles) from the frontline, at the time of the attack.
According to a statement from the Hans Lucas photo agency, both journalists were wearing personal protective equipment, and their bulletproof vests had identification marks with the word “PRESS” on them.
A witness told the BBC that the noise of chainsaws – being used to build defensive positions – may have prevented them from hearing the drone overhead.
The brigade’s press officer, Anastasia Haletska – who was also wounded in the attack – said she managed to apply tourniquets to Mr Ivanchenko, before both of them were taken to a hospital in nearby Kramatorsk.
Mr Lallican was killed instantly, she said. Mr Ivanchenko is in a stable condition, but had to have his leg amputated.
French President Emmanuel Macron shared a tribute to Mr Lallican and said he had been a victim of a Russian drone attack.
“I express my sincere condolences to his family, loved ones, and all his colleagues who, risking their lives, inform us and bear witness to the reality of war,” he wrote on X.
Mr Lallican’s work has been published by numerous outlets, including French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro.
His work in Ukraine, which traces the “consequences of the war”, has taken him across the country, from Odesa, in the south-west, to Kharkiv, in the north-east, according to his website.
Families fleeing in the early days of the invasion, elderly men and women refusing to leave their homes under Russian bombardment, and soldiers fighting and living on the frontline populate his photographs, among many others whose lives have been upended by the war.
According to the EFJ and IFJ, 17 journalists have been killed since the invasion began.
In a joint statement, they said: “We pay tribute to the courage of Antoni Lallican and all the journalists who continue to cover the war. We demand that the perpetrators of his crime be brought to justice.
Sergiy Tomilenko, president of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), accused Russia of “deliberately hunting those trying to document war crimes”.
“For journalists, every trip to the frontline zone is a deadly risk. Antoni Lallican took this risk again and again, coming to Ukraine, traveling to Donbas, documenting what many prefer not to see,” he said in a statement.
“He built a visual bridge between the world and Ukrainian reality. Now he himself has become part of this tragic story”.
The Kremlin has not commented on the attack.
With additional reporting by Volodymyr Lozhko.
