He was shot Tuesday night in the village of Chervlyonna, about 25 kilometers northeast of Grozny, ministry spokesman Colonel Ivan Skrylnik said.
Another journalist, Vladimir Sorokin from the daily newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta, whose work has also appeared in The Moscow Times, was also wounded along with several Russian soldiers, in what the ministry called a "kamikaze" attack by a Chechen rebel.
Skrylnik said the Chechen rebel drove a train through a barricade protecting Russian units clearing mines from the railway track. He opened fire as he rammed the train into the barricade, hitting several people.
A spokesman at Stern's headquarters in Hamburg, Germany, said the Chechen drove a small diesel locomotive at high speed toward an empty Russian troop train parked on the track.
"He fired his submachine gun and the reporters threw themselves onto the ground. Piest was fatally hit by three bullets, Sorokin was hit in the leg," the spokesman said.
He said the gunman died when the locomotive collided with the military train.
Piest, 29, had worked as a Moscow correspondent for Stern since last March. The spokesman said he knew Russia well. "He wrote lively and well-told reports for Stern, as well as analytical pieces about politics in Moscow," he said.
He was the third journalist killed since Russia invaded the tiny, breakaway republic Dec. 11.
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