Kursk region: Russian propagandist was seriously wounded in his car after being hit by an FPV drone

8 August, 2024 Russian propagandist Yevgeny Poddubny, August 8, 2024. Photo: Ostrozhno, novosti Russian war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny was seriously injured in his car after being hit by a drone strike.

Footage of his hospitalization was posted online. Immediately after the incident, reports from Russian sources about the propagandist's death began to circulate online, but the information turned out to be premature. During a trip to the combat zone in the Kursk region, Poddubny suffered massive burns, a traumatic brain injury, and damage to the bones of the frontal part of his skull.

The Russian war correspondent was taken to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Kursk. On August 8, the first detailed footage of Poddubny after his transfer to the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine in Moscow was released. According to Russian Telegram channels, the journalist survived only because he fell out of the car a few seconds after the FPV drone hit, after which the car caught fire. "The film crew that was following saw the burning vehicle and assumed that Yevgeny was dead.

Later, he was accidentally spotted and rescued by an evacuation team," they said. Ukrainian volunteer and blogger Serhii Sternenko posted on his page a drone camera shot showing the propagandist's car a second before it was hit. He noted that it was the same car that had previously appeared in Poddubny's reports, but painted gray.

Yevgeny Poddubny's car in the lens of an FPV drone, July 7, 2024.

Photo credits: Serhii Sternenko

Yevgeny Poddubny is one of Russia's most prominent pro-government propagandists. He works for the VGTRK media holding and owns a Telegram channel with more than 700,000 subscribers. Since 2014, he has repeatedly illegally crossed the state border of Ukraine and filmed propaganda reports in the occupied territories, spreading narratives about the "civil war" and "neo-Nazis."

In April this year, the Ukrainian Defense Forces killed Yevgeny Polovodov, Russian propagandist and press officer of the Russian Ministry of Defense in the Kreminna sector.