Russia’s Emergency Minister Yevgeny Zinichev died Wednesday after trying to save a filmmaker who fell from a cliff into the water during a drill in the Arctic. The ministry was filming a training video in the Krasnoyarsk region of the country when the filmmaker, director Alexander Melnik, fell from a cliff at the Kitabo Oron waterfall, located outside the city of Norilsk. Zinichev rushed after him, but was killed by a protruding rock, BBC News reported. His body returned to Moscow on Wednesday. Andrei Gurovich, the deputy emergency minister, told state media that Zinichev responded “not as a minister, but as a rescuer. That’s how he lived his whole life.”
Zinichev has been the country’s emergency minister since 2018 and is considered a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin said Zinichev’s death was a great loss. Melnik directed the 2015 film Arctic Territories.
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