Russian agent killed Kremlin critic, Kyiv says
• A senior Ukrainian official says the killer of Kremlin critic Denis Voronenkov, who was gunned down in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, was a Russian agent.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, identified the man who shot Voronenkov on Thursday as 28- yearold Pavel Parshov and said he had been trained in Russia by Russian security services. He was killed in the attack.
“He underwent a special course at a school for saboteurs,” Gerashchenko wrote Friday in a Facebook post.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters that Gerashchenko’s allegation was “absurd.”
Voronenkov, a former Russian lawmaker who became a vociferous critic of Moscow following his recent move to Ukraine, was shot dead near the entrance to an upscale hotel in the centre of Kyiv.
Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, said Voronenkov was killed shortly before meeting with another fugitive Russian lawmaker, Ilya Ponomaryov. Both men were scheduled to give testimony later Thursday at Ukraine’s Military Prosecutor’s Office. The purpose of the testimony was not immediately clear.
Ukrainian media on Friday published leaked CCTV footage of the attack. It shows the killer shooting Voronenkov from behind as he was walking down the street with his bodyguard.
When the bodyguard tries to intervene, he, too, is shot, leaving the killer free to shoot Voronenkov again as he is lying on the floor. The injured bodyguard then pulls out his gun and, while lying on the floor, opens fire on the killer, who died later in the hospital.
The slaying ignited an uproar between Moscow and Kyiv, with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko immediately calling the killing an “act of state terrorism” by Russia. Russian officials angrily denied the charge, suggesting that Ukraine was organizing a coverup.
But Putin’s critics couldn’t help drawing parallels with the unexplained deaths of other Kremlin foes. “I have an impression — I hope it’s only an impression — that the practice of killing political opponents has started spreading in Russia,” said Gennady Gudkov, a former parliamentarian and ex- security services officer, to the Moscow Times.
Here are some outspoken critics of Putin who were killed or died mysteriously.
BORIS NEMTSOV, 2015
In the 1990s, Nemtsov was a political star of post- Soviet Russia’s “young reformers.” He became deputy prime minister and was, for a while, seen as possible presidential material. Nemtsov led massive street rallies in protest of the 2011 parliamentary election results and wrote reports on official corruption. In Feb. 2015, just hours after urging the public to join a march against Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine, Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin.
BORIS BEREZOVSKY, 2013
A self- styled tycoon who become a fixture in Yeltsin’s inner circle in the late 1990s, Berezovsky is believed to have been instrumental in Putin’s rise to power. But Berezovsky was unable to exert the influence under the new president he had hoped. His falling out with Putin led to his self- exile in the United Kingdom, where he vowed to bring down the president. Berezovsky was found dead inside a locked bathroom at his home in the United Kingdom, a noose around his neck, in what was at first deemed a suicide.
STANISLAV MARKELOV AND ANASTASIA BABUROVA, 2009
Markelov was a human rights lawyer known for representing Chechen civilians in human rights cases again the Russian military. He also represented journalists who found themselves in legal trouble after writing articles critical of Putin, including Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was slain in 2006. Markelov was shot by a masked gunman near t he Kremlin. Baburova, also a journalist from Novaya Gazeta, was fatally shot as she tried to help him.
SERGEI MAGNITSKY, 2009
Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in police custody in November 2009 after allegedly being brutally beaten, then denied medical care. He had been working for British-American businessman William Browder to investigate a massive tax fraud case. Magnitsky was allegedly arrested after uncovering evidence suggesting that police officials were behind the fraud. In 2012, Magnitsky was posthumously convicted of tax evasion, and Browder lobbied the U. S. government to impose sanctions on those linked to his death. The sanctions bill bears his name.
NATALIA ESTEMIROVA, 2009
Natalya Estemirova was a journalist who investigated abductions and murders that had become commonplace in Chechnya. There, pro-Russian security forces waged a brutal crackdown to weed out Islamic militants responsible for some of the country’s worst terrorist attacks. Estemirova was kidnapped outside her home, shot several times — including a point- blank shot in the head — and dumped in the nearby woods. Nobody has been convicted of her murder.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, 2006
Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian reporter for Novaya Gazeta whose book, Putin’s Russia, accused the Kremlin leader of turning the country into a police state. She was shot at point-blank range in an elevator in her building. Five men were convicted of her murder, but the judge found that it was a contract killing, with $ 150,000 of the fee paid by a person whose identity was never discovered.
ALEXANDER LITVINENKO, 2006
Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea laced with deadly polonium-210 at a London hotel. A British inquiry found that Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were acting on orders that had “probably been approved by President Putin.”
SERGEI YUSHENKOV, 2003
The affable former army colonel was a favourite of parliamentary reporters in the early 1990s. Sergei Yushenkov had just registered his Liberal Russia movement as a political party when he was gunned down outside his home in Moscow. Yushenkov was gathering evidence he believed proved that the Putin government was behind one of the apartment bombings in 1999.