A Russian journalist critical of President Vladimir Putin was shot dead at his home in Kiev on Tuesday night, the third assassination in two years of a Kremlin critic in Ukraine's capital.
Arkady Babchenko, who moved to the city last year following threats in his homeland, was fired on after returning from buying bread and died of his injuries in an ambulance, local police said. They said the killing may relate to his work.
Babchenko, 41, served as a soldier in both wars in Chechnya before turning his bleak experience into the acclaimed memoir One Soldier's War. He served as a war correspondent for more than a decade, writing about the war in Georgia and later in southeast Ukraine.
He fled Russia in 2017 after provoking a scandal in a Facebook post that expressed indifference over the deaths of a military choir and other passengers aboard a Russian plane that crashed en route to Syria. In the backlash, his home address was published and he received personal threats. Some people called for Babchenko to be stripped of his Russian citizenship.
Babchenko complained of an atmosphere of hate toward his work. “Some called for me to be stripped of citizenship, others are making an online game where you can beat me to death,” he said. “In Russia, dissidents like me are harassed with impunity.”
He moved first to the Czech Republic and then to Israel, before settling in Kiev, where he worked for the Crimean broadcaster ATR. "All the elements of the propaganda machine were engaged," he wrote in the Guardian last year, calling the experience "so personal, so scary, that I was forced to flee".
He travelled to the conflict in Ukraine, which continues to claim lives, and criticised the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines passenger flight MH17, which killed 298 people. Investigators from Australia and the Netherlands last week blamed Russia for the tragedy.
As a reporter, Babchenko staked out a position as an opponent of war. His memoirs were the opposite of triumphant, describing the dangerous, banal daily life of a soldier on the frontlines of the conflict in Chechnya. Asked what he wanted to say in the memoirs, he told the Guardian in 2007: "I exist. I was in this war. And this is what I saw."
The day of his death, he wrote online about an incident in which a Ukrainian general denied him permission to travel on a helicopter during the beginning of the war in 2014. The helicopter was later shot down. “Fourteen people were killed,” Babchenko wrote. “I was lucky. It turns out to have been the second day of my birth.”
Police on Wednesday published an identikit picture of his killer. His wife, who was in their apartment when the murder took place, was in shock and unable to be questioned. Babchenko’s death follows those of prominent Russian journalist Pavel Sheremet, killed in a car bomb in Kiev in 2016, and ex-Russian lawmaker Denis Voronenkov, who was shot dead in the city in 2017.
The murder will further strain ties between Ukraine and Russia, post-Soviet allies who fell out following the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin leader in 2014. That prompted Putin to annex Crimea and back a war on the two nations’ border. The incident will also resonate beyond the ex-communist space after the nerve-agent attack on a Russian double agent and his daughter in the UK this year triggered diplomatic expulsions around the world.
“Russia’s totalitarian machine didn’t forgive him his honesty,” Ukrainian prime minister Volodymyr Hroisman said on Facebook. “He was a real friend of Ukraine who told the truth to the world about Russian aggression.”
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov complained Wednesday that his country is being accused without proof, calling the killing "a tragedy."
– Bloomberg, Guardian