The jury in RT's fifth-annual Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards selected its 2022 winners on Monday, with two correspondents from the Rossiya Segodnya Media Group receiving top awards for best humanitarian written and video journalism.
Maria Marikyan of Sputnik’s Russian-language sister agency, RIA Novosti, received the Best Humanitarian Journalism: Written award for her work "They Might Come Back," sharing the stories of residents of Popasnaya, a small town in the Lugansk People’s Republic leveled by Ukrainian artillery strikes this summer, and their difficulties living without access to basic amenities.
Regina Orekhova, a journalist from the TOK project, also part of Rossiya Segodnya, took the Best Humanitarian Journalism: Video award for her report "Civilians," focusing on the inhabitants of the besieged city of Mariupol, home to brutal battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces, who did not lose their humanity in the face of death and hunger.
The jury gave its top written journalism from a conflict zone prize to Alexander Kots for his report "Fighting Outside Kiev: Gostomel Warriors," which covered the exploits of the Russian paratroopers who singlehandedly held a defensive line against superior enemy forces and firepower for over a month outside the Ukrainian capital this past the spring. Kots is a correspondent for Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
The Best Journalism From a Conflict Zone: Video award went to Valentin Trushnin for his work "Monastery: Through Heaven and Hell," covering the evacuation of civilians from the Nikolsky Monastery under shelling by Ukrainian forces.
The Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards were established by Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan in honor of late independent war and RT Arabic contributor Khaled Alkhateb, who died in the Syrian province of Homs in a terrorist rocket attack in 2017 while covering the Western, Turkish, and Gulf State-backed war in that country. Alkhateb was one of over 100 journalists killed in Syria since the conflict began in 2011.
The conflict in Ukraine, set to enter its ninth year this coming spring, is another dangerous place to be for journalists. This past June, Russian military journalist Sergei Postnov was killed on the front lines while covering the conflict. The same month, two Reuters journalists were injured and their driver killed in a Ukrainian shelling attack near Severodonetsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic. Ukraine as a whole and Donbass have been fraught with risks for independent and pro-Russian journalists, with Rossiya Segodnya photo correspondent Andrei Stenin and three other Russian journalists: Igor Kornelyuk, Anton Voloshin, and Anatoly Klyan killed while covering the war in 2014. Andrea Rocchelli, an Italian freelance photojournalist, was killed separately in a Ukrainian machine gun and mortar attack in 2014. The violence has also seen the cold-blooded killings of opposition journalists in Kiev, Odessa, and Slavyansk, including Ukrainian journalist and writer Oles Buzina in 2015, and Belarusian-Russian and Ukrainian journalist Pavel Sheremet, who died in a car bomb in Kiev in 2016, allegedly at the hands of the Security Service of Ukraine.