Brussels, 30 May 2018 (KNO) : The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has strongly condemned the murder of the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kiev, Ukraine. Babchenko, 41, has been shot and killed on May 29, 2018. His wife found him bleeding at their apartment, but he died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital. The killing appeared to be targeted, as the gunman apparently waited for the journalist in the stairwell of his building and shot him in the back. The head of Ukraine’s police force said that two motives were being considered: his “professional work and civil position.”
After serving as a soldier in both wars in Chechnya, he became a war correspondent and worked for the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station. Extremely critical of the Kremlin, he fled Russia in 2017 after provoking a scandal in a Facebook post that expressed the indifference over the deaths of a military choir and other passengers aboard a Russian plane that crashed en route to Syria. He wrote in the Guardian last year that “All the elements of the propaganda machine were engaged.”
He added that the experience was “so personal, so scary, that I was forced to flee.” In 2016, he contributed to an IFJ safety hand book for journalists in Ukraine as part of the dialogue program between Russian and Ukrainian journalists. In a statement, the IFJ affiliate, the Russian Union of Journalists (RUJ) has condemned the murder of the Russian journalist. RUJ Secretary, Yulia Zagitova, said the RUJ was “outraged by the murder of Arkady Babchenko. Unfortunately, today the death of journalists, as a rule, is connected with the fulfilment of their professional duty. And it does not matter who these journalists are by nationality and what their views are.
They are journalists. They extract information. And for this you cannot kill them. We hope Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies will deal with those who are involved in this murder. We express our deepest condolences to those close to us and to everyone who knew Arkady Babchenko.” Likewise, the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), another IFJ affiliate, has condemned the brutal murder.
“We demand that law enforcement officers conduct a qualitative and effective investigation of the crime. Unfortunately, this murder occurs against a background of systemic impunity for crimes against journalists, which our Union records in Ukraine. After all, in cases of murders, or in cases of physical attacks on journalists, there are no precedents of weighty punishments for those who attack journalists or the media.”
The IFJ calls on Ukrainian authorities to identify and prosecute the killer. “Impunity persists in Ukraine. The murder of our colleague, Arkady Babchenko, comes two years after the murder of another prominent journalist, Pavel Sheremet, who was killed by a car bomb in the Ukrainian capital in 2016,” said IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger. “A thorough investigation must be conducted in order to punish the killer, put an end to impunity, and to make sure a free press and freedom of expression are safeguarded.”