Russian dissident journalist murdered in Kyiv

Arkady Babchenko, a Russian dissident journalist and
Kremlin critic working in Ukraine, was shot and killed outside his apartment
building in Kyiv on the evening of May 29. He died in an ambulance after receiving
three gunshots to the back. He had worked for the Crimean Tatar ATR television
network since October, being a vocal critic of Putin’s military aggression in
Ukraine. Having extensively reported on the Russian military, Babchenko left
his native Russia after receiving death threats reacting to a December 2016
Facebook post in which he voiced his lack of sympathy for the victims of the
Russian Defense Ministry’s Tupolev air crash into the Black Sea. Among the
victims were Russian mainstream journalists and armed forces choir members.

The most likely reason for Babchenko’s murder was his
professional activity, a police official told reporters at the scene, though he
couldn’t confirm the motive yet. Addressing the United Nations that day,
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin confirmed that it was early to
establish a motive, “but understanding similar incidents, we have serious
grounds to say that Russia is trying to use also other tactics to destabilize
Ukraine. That’s conducting terrorist acts, sabotage and political murders.”

Zenon Zawada: Babchenko is the most high-profile journalist to have been murdered in
Ukraine since Pavel Sheremet in July 2016, though numerous journalists have been
killed since then. Truth is among the first casualties of war so such tragedies
are to be expected as the armed conflict in Donbas drags on. What’s
disconcerting is that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict continues to extend beyond
the Donbas region, which serves to destabilize conditions even in the Ukrainian
capital.