iStock/Thinkstock(MOSCOW) — A prominent journalist in Kiev was killed when a bomb exploded in his car as he drove to work in the center of Ukraine’s capital, shocking the country with what is one of the most brazen killings of a reporter there in over a decade.
Pavel Sheremet, 44, was a veteran reporter, well known as a liberal voice who was often critical of authorities in both Ukraine and Russia. In Kiev, he was a presenter on a radio network and also a reporter for a popular news site, Ukrayinskaya Pravda.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general said authorities are investigating the blast that occurred on a busy street in the heart of Kiev as a planned “professional” killing. The prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, ruled out a technical fault as a cause for the blast, calling it “murder.”
The moment of the explosion was caught by a CCTV camera. In the video, a powerful explosion is seen blasting out of the car’s front. Witnesses quickly hurry to the car to help, as flames engulf the vehicle. Other videos of the aftermath that were shot on mobile phones show Sheremet being pulled out of the car, his legs apparently mangled.
A crusading reporter, Sheremet was perhaps better known in Russia than in Ukraine, having worked for years with one of Russia’s main television networks, ORT. He left the network in 2008 in protest — at what he saw as the increasing loss of free speech at the broadcaster as the Kremlin clamped down on the media in Russia — and warned that the country was headed towards authoritarianism.
He later moved to Ukraine, where he began working for Ukrayinskaya Pravda, one of the country’s top news sites that closely covers political affairs. Often covering human rights issues and known as a fearless critic of authorities, he was jailed in his native Belarus in 1997 during a crackdown on political opposition there.
“He always had a broad smile and the unwavering belief that good will overcome evil in the end,” Katerina Gordeeva, a former colleague of Sheremet, wrote in a tribute on the Russian news site, Meduza.
The U.S. embassy in Kiev released a statement calling Sheremet “a fearless practitioner and supporter of freedom of speech” and said it welcomed Ukraine’s authorities’ efforts to find his killers.
On the morning of his death, Sheremet had been on his way to present his show at the Vesti radio station and was alone in the car of his partner, Olena Prytula, a founding editor of Ukrayinskaya Pravda. Relatives of Sheremet told the Russian investigative paper, Novaya Gazeta, that he had complained recently of being followed.
An adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, Zoryan Skiryak, said investigators were examining whether Sheremet’s professional work or possible personal relations could have been a motive for his murder. Officials also suggested that the killing might be intended to “destabilize” the country, with some suggesting Russia may have had a hand in it.
Skiryak, writing on his Facebook account, said the investigation could not exclude the possibility of a “Russian trace” in the bombing.
Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, expressed shock at the attack and said he believed the purpose went beyond killing Sheremet.
“It seems to me that this was done with one goal — to destabilize the country,” the Interfax news agency quoted Poroshenko as saying.
The political atmosphere in Ukraine is fraught more than two years since the country’s revolution and amid a smoldering civil war in the country’s East between government forces and pro-Russian rebels backed by Moscow.
Ukrainian politicians are often quick to point blame for events in Ukraine at Moscow, which has deployed special forces units in the East.
A spokesman for Russian president Vladimir Putin on Wednesday expressed his condolences to Sheremet’s family, saying the killing of a Russian citizen was “a cause of serious concern in the Kremlin”.
Maria Zakharova, a spokesman for Russia’s foreign ministry, praised Sheremet as a “professional, not afraid to tell the authorities what he thought.” She added, though, that Sheremet’s murder suggested that Ukraine was “becoming a brotherly tomb for journalists and journalism,” apparently referring to Russia’s own dark history of reporters getting murdered over their work.
Sheremet’s death follows a series of apparently politically-motivated murders in Ukraine. In April 2015, a lawmaker and a pro-Russian journalist were both shot dead in Kiev. More recently, a lawyer representing two Russian military officers captured in eastern Ukraine was found murdered after mysteriously going missing.
The murder of Sheremet had painful echoes for the Ukrayinskaya Pravda news site, whose founder, Horgiy Gongadze, was kidnapped and decapitated in 2000, after criticizing Ukraine’s then-president Leonid Kuchma. That death was viewed as helping to precipitate Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004.
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