Kirill Romanovsky, correspondent for RIA FAN, has died

War correspondent for the pro-Kremlin news outlet RIA FAN (Federal News Agency) has died, reports his friend and RIA FAN author Abbas Juma, on his personal Telegram channel.

He also posted a video featuring Evgeny Prigozhin, the head of RIA FAN and PMC Wagner, speaking about Romanovsky’s death. “I just met with Abbas Juma, who told me that we lost Kirill Romanovsky today,” said the oligarch. He called Romanovsky his comrade and “the greatest war correspondent.”

Neither Prigozhin nor Juma mentioned the cause of Romanovsky’s death. Pro-Kremlin war correspondent Alexander Kots says that Romanovsky had a brain tumor. According to Anna Dolgareva, another RIA FAN author, the tumor was the result of an injury. At the end of December, Juma wrote, citing Romanovsky’s wife, that he was “recovering poorly” following another brain surgery.

Kirill Romanovsky became infamous in 2018, after the murders of Russian documentary filmmakers Alexander Rastorguev, Kirill Rachenko, and Orkhan Djemal, who were making a film about PMC Wager in the Central African Republic (CAR).

According to the Dossier Center, which is backed by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Romanovsky gave the filmmakers the contact information for a fixer named Martin, who was allegedly supposed to help them organize filming in the CAR. The journalists were killed when they went to meet him. The Dossier Center concluded that people associated with Prigozhin were monitoring the filmmakers’ movements, and that Martin may have been fictitious.