September 08, (THEWILL) – The Russian Minister for Emergency Situations, Yevgeny Zinichev, has died during training drills in the Arctic, Moscow said on Wednesday.
Zinichev, a former KGB officer and former close protection officer of President Vladimir Putin, died while saving another person, his ministry said in a statement to Russian news agencies.
“He tragically died performing his official duty during inter-departmental exercises to protect the Arctic zone from emergency situations, while saving a person’s life,” the statement confirmed.
The Russian Emergencies Ministry said Zinichev was trying to save the prominent film director, Alexander Melnik, who has also been reported dead.
According to the editor-in-chief of the pro-Kremlin RT television channel, Zinichev was “on the edge of a cliff with Melnik who slipped and fell into the water.”
Alexander Melnik was a well-known Russian film director who made the 2015 drama, “Territory,” about the discovery of a remote gold deposit in the Soviet Union’s far north. He regularly worked with the ministry, state media reported.
Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told news agencies that President Putin had been informed of the accident and has expressed his condolences.
Former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and the current prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, have also offered their condolences.
THEWILL gathered that Zinichev had been on a working visit to the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk. On Tuesday, he opened large-scale drills spanning seven regions in the Russian Arctic that were scheduled to last through Wednesday.
The exercises were ended on Wednesday shortly after reports of his death were confirmed.
Zinichev became the head of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry in May 2018. His predecessor stepped down after a major fire at a Siberian shopping centre killed more than 60 people, sending shockwaves throughout the country.
In 2016, Zinichev had a two-month stint as the acting governor of Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad region.
