‘Dead’ Russian journalist alive and well
Death was faked to catch real assassin, Ukrainian security service explains
The assassination bore all the hallmarks of yet another contract killing carried out in the murky shadows of the conflict pitting Russia against Ukraine.
A photo of the victim, a dissident Russian journalist, showed him lying facedown Tuesday in a vermilion pool of his own blood. He was found by his wife and died on the way to a hospital from multiple gunshot wounds to the back, said the police in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
Then on Wednesday, the journalist, Arkady Babchenko, to all appearances very much alive, walked into a news conference that Ukrainian security officials had called to discuss his “murder.”
“First of all, I would like to apologize that all of you had to live through this, because I know the horrible feeling when you have to bury your colleagues,” Babchenko told stunned reporters after the gasps died down. “Separately, I want to apologize to my wife for all the hell she had to go through.”
The staged death, said Vasily S. Gritsak, the head of the Ukraine Security Service, was a sting operation aimed at stopping a real assassination plot against Babchenko. It was the latest twist — if an especially bizarre one — in the tortured relations between Ukraine and Russia, which annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and is fuelling a separatist war in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia constantly lob charges and countercharges accusing each other of various forms of skulduggery. And they often accuse each other of fabricating claims.
The announcement by Ukrainian authorities that they had, in fact, made up the Babchenko killing offered the Russians a rare chance to claim the high ground. Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a blistering statement, saying Ukraine would be better off solving real crimes, like the killing of two journalists in Kyiv in 2015 and 2016.
“Matters of life and death in Ukraine, as well as trust of the international community to its policy, are nothing more than a bargaining chip used to fuel the anti-Russian hysteria of the Kyiv regime,” the Russian statement said.
Both the story of Babchenko’s death and that of his resurrection garnered enormous attention around the world.
Various voices, especially from the journalism world, called the ploy a bad idea in an era when battling fake news has become a daily problem — and when real news is dismissed as fake whenever politicians from Washington to the Kremlin find it in their interest to do so.
Critics said Ukraine’s actions would only help the Kremlin raise doubts now when it is accused of wrongdoing, as in the shooting down of a civilian airliner over Ukraine in 2014 that killed nearly 300 people, and the poisoning of a retired Russian spy and his daughter in Britain in March.
Reporters Without Borders condemned the Ukrainian Security Service, calling it “dangerous” for any government to manipulate facts.
Ukrainian officials defended their actions, saying the ruse had been necessary to try to stop Russian-financed attacks against targets in Ukraine. Gritsak said there was no doubt that “the assassination of the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was ordered by Russian intelligence.”
One Ukrainian Parliament member, writing on Facebook, found justification in literature. Even Sherlock Holmes, he said, faked his own death “to effectively investigate difficult and complicated crimes.”
Babchenko, 41, a former war correspondent, fled Russia last year after his criticism of the Kremlin for the wars in Ukraine and Syria prompted a nationalist campaign of intimidation against him.
Before Babchenko’s death was unveiled as staged, officials in Ukraine and Russia accused the other country of ordering the killing and then lying about it.
Ukrainian security officials did not fully explain how their ruse was supposed to work. One man, a Ukrainian, is already in custody, they said.
They said it began after they got wind of a $40,000 (U.S.) contract to assassinate Babchenko, which they said had been paid for by Russian security services. Authorities identified the supposed organizer as Mr. G., a Ukrainian citizen, and showed tape of security agents arresting a portly man in a white shirt on a city street.
Mr. G., they said, had hired a veteran of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine to carry out the killing. But the hitman secretly agreed to co-operate with the security services, officials said, pretending to carry out the killing and collecting a $30,000 fee. (Mr. G. kept $10,000 for himself, they said.)