Killing sends a chilling message to Kiev
A former Russian legislator, shot dead in the Ukraine capital, shows Putin can act anywhere, writes Leonid Bershidsky
Mr Putin is often accused of having his political opponents killed.
Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian legislator, was shot dead in broad daylight in downtown Kiev on Thursday. This is almost certainly a political murder ordered by the Kremlin in the long-standing KGB tradition of executing traitors — and a chilling statement of intent from Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Ukrainian government.
Ever since Ukraine’s 2014 anti-corruption revolution, crime has been on the rise in Kiev. In January, 2017, 15 people were murdered in the Ukrainian capital, compared with six in the prior January.
Voronenkov, however, was no average victim. Last fall, he became exposed to criminal charges of illegally seizing a Moscow building after his term in the Russian parliament expired. With his wife, also a former Russian legislator as well as a wellknown opera singer, he fled to Ukraine, where Voronenkov promptly received citizenship — a rare feat in Ukraine — presumably because the government saw him as a star witness in a high-profile investigation of former president Viktor Yanukovych.
I wrote about Voronenkov’s defection last month, after the former legislator started giving colourful interviews to Ukrainian media. He compared Russia to Nazi Germany, swore he’d been a Putin opponent during the failed 2011 protests in Moscow (though it was the Kremlinrigged election that year that brought him into parliament) and praised the Ukrainian revolution. I knew him to be insincere. Throughout his tenure in parliament, Voronenkov was a faithful servant to the Kremlin, sponsoring one of the worst bills on Mr Putin’s third presidential term — the one that banned foreign ownership of Russian media and forced Western publishers to dump their Russian assets at fire sale prices, mostly to Kremlin loyalists. Parliament speaker Sergei Naryshkin, who now heads Russia’s foreign intelligence service, sang at Voronenkov’s wedding.
Despite always having worked for the government, Voronenkov somehow managed to amass a fortune. He was typical of the Putin generation of civil servants and politicians — unprincipled, willing to say whatever’s required to get ahead, intimately familiar with the shady business side of the regime. It’s hardly fair to call him a “Putin critic” or a “whistle-blower”, as some US news outlets have done. Rather, he defected after developing problems working in the fuzzy zone between Russian government and business.
Mr Putin is often accused of having his political opponents killed. In most of these cases, there is little or no evidence of Kremlin involvement. But people like Voronenkov, who served the system before betraying it, are a completely different matter.
Vengeance against such people is built into Mr Putin’s DNA as a former intelligence officer. Ever since the Bolshevik revolution, its intelligence service, the Cheka, and all its successor organisations — including the KGB and the modern Russian intelligence services — have sought to liquidate “traitors”, and they have often succeeded, unless rival services took special care to protect the defectors. Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian state security operative poisoned with polonium in London, was probably one target of Mr Putin’s revenge. Voronenkov also fit.
Voronenkov, a former Russian military lawyer, seemed to know the risks of cooperating with a Ukrainian investigation into Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally. In one of his Kiev interviews, indeed, he exhibited a peculiar fatalism. Asked why he’d stayed so close to Russia if he was trying to avoid the Russian intelligence services who chased him out of the country, as he claimed, he replied: “I’ll tell you as a former employee of the special services, a former colonel in the justice and police systems: that won’t help. The world is open and transparent now, believe me. If someone wants to do it, it won’t be hard at all, whether you’re in New Zealand, Australia or America.”
Ukraine’s Security Service said on Thursday that it did not guard Voronenkov in Kiev. He had a private bodyguard, who mortally wounded the former legislator’s shooter. The former legislator was an easy target.
The shooting took place on the fourth anniversary of the apparent suicide of Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who helped Mr Putin come to power in 2000 before fleeing to London when the relationship soured.
The Kremlin, of course, denied that it had anything to do with the “tragedy” in Kiev. But the Ukrainian government got the message. After the murder, President Petro Poroshenko called together his security chiefs and told them it was “an act of state terrorism on the part of Russia”.
Voronenkov was the first high-level defector to choose Kiev over Western Europe and the US, and the route may have seemed promising to others. Now, that’s probably not the case.
Relations between Ukraine and Russia, dismal since the latter annexed Crimea in 2014, are now at a nadir. Ukraine has ceased trading with its eastern territories, held by pro-Russian separatists.
It has also imposed sanctions on Russian banks, which hold a significant share
of assets in the Ukrainian banking system. Ukraine, which is hosting the Eurovision song contest this year, has even banned the Russian participant from entering the country because she had given a concert in occupied Crimea.
The final severing of the remaining economic and cultural ties looks like preparation for an all-out war. Whether or not that’s the case, the high-profile murder in Kiev is a direct warning from the Kremlin, which is showing that it can operate anywhere in Ukraine as though it were its own turf. Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.