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Journalism of Courage
Kseniya Alexandrova, who shot to fame as the first runner-up at Miss Russia 2017 and went on to represent her country at Miss Universe the same year, has died at the age of 30.
According to Russian news website Hola!, Alexandrova passed away on August 12, succumbing to injuries sustained in a car accident in the country’s Tver Oblast region in July. Following the accident, she had been admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) at the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine.
The report further stated that Alexandrova was in the passenger seat when the car, driven by her husband Ilya, hit an elk which then crashed through the windshield. Elk is a large species of deer native to North America as well as Central and East Asia. While Ilya suffered no serious harm, Alexandrova sustained a serious head injury in the accident.
“From the moment it (the elk) jumped out to the impact, a split second passed. I didn’t have time to do anything,” Ilya told Fox News in a statement translated from Russian.
“She was unconscious, her head was fractured, everything was covered in blood. The frontal bones of the skull were broken – it was an open cranial-brain injury,” he added.
Beyond modelling, Alexandrova had built a career in mental wellbeing. In 2016, she secured a finance degree from the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. She later pivoted to psychology, studying at Moscow State Pedagogical University, and eventually began working as a therapist, a report in Hola! said.
Alexandrova regularly shared insights into mental health on her Instagram handle. In one post from April, she reflected on common themes in her therapy sessions. “If I were asked what people most often come to therapy with, anxiety would definitely be one of the first on the list,” she wrote in the caption.
Her appearance on the Miss Universe stage in 2017 marked a major moment in Alexandrova’s professional journey.
