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Pavel Sheremet, Journalist in Ukraine, Is Killed in Car Bombing Pavel Sheremet, Journalist in Ukraine, Is Killed in Car Bombing
(about 13 hours later)
MOSCOW — A prominent radio and television journalist in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was killed in a car bombing on Wednesday, officials said, in one of the highest-profile assassinations of a reporter in the country in years. MOSCOW — The red Subaru was making its way through an intersection in central Kiev on Wednesday when the driver’s door suddenly blew ajar with a burst of smoke.
The journalist, Pavel Sheremet, 44, a Belarussian citizen who had worked for Russian state television before moving to Ukraine to host a morning radio news program five years ago, died when the car he was driving exploded near Kiev’s government quarter. The blast threw the driver, Pavel G. Sheremet, a prominent journalist, into the back seat. The vehicle stopped then rolled backward, and for a moment, he seemed to be struggling to crawl free of the wreckage, closed circuit video showed.
Mr. Sheremet was among several well-known journalists in Russia who moved to Ukraine, where restrictions on the news media are looser, around the time a new government took over in the country, in 2014. Members of this group have been highly critical of the new leadership. Bystanders rushed over and pulled him out, before the car burst into flames in front of a McDonald’s restaurant. But Mr. Sheremet was fatally wounded. The bombing left a small crater in the road, charred metal, melted glass — another political murder mystery in a part of the world that has had many of them.
The explosion scattered car parts over paving stones and sent them into a swirl of orange flames, photographs of the scene showed. Ukraine's Interior Ministry said that the bomb had been placed in or under the vehicle and detonated by remote control.
Yuriy V. Lutsenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor general, said on Facebook that a car bomb had caused the explosion, and he ruled out a technical fault with the vehicle. By the afternoon, President Petro O. Poroshenko called an emergency meeting of his national security staff and strongly hinted that Russia had been behind the brazen assassination.
Mr. Sheremet, the only occupant of the car, reported for Vesti, a radio news show based in Kiev, and also worked for Ukrainska Pravda, a well-respected news outlet. “It seems this was an act done with the intention of destabilizing the situation in the country,” Mr. Poroshenko said. “In the conditions of war and aggression, I am not excluding the possibility of some foreign interest here.”
In Russia, Mr. Sheremet had worked for ORT, a leading state-owned television station. But in Moscow, Dmitry S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, issued a statement noting that Mr. Sheremet was a Russian citizen and that the Kremlin was not only “seriously disturbed” by the killing, but hoped for a rapid and impartial investigation.
The car belonged to Mr. Sheremet’s girlfriend, Olena Prytula, a founding editor of Ukrainska Pravda, whose journalists, like others in the former Soviet Union, have been singled out for retribution. Speaking on Echo of Moscow radio Wednesday morning, his colleagues speculated that Ms. Prytula might have been the intended target. Russia’s Foreign Ministry posted a statement on its website saying Mr. Sheremet was indeed a critic of the Russian government but that he had never been threatened by “physical violence” for those views while in Russia. “The incumbent Ukrainian government, supported by its Euro-Atlantic patrons for its purportedly successful democratic reforms, did not manage to protect him,” the statement said.
In 2000, a Ukrainska Pravda reporter, Georgiy Gongadze, who had been highly critical of the president at the time, Leonid Kuchma, was killed and beheaded, a death that still resonates in Ukrainian journalistic circles. On Tuesday, another journalist was attacked in Kiev but survived, though it was unclear if the two cases had any connection.
In Russia, the opposition leader Mikhail N. Kasyanov issued a statement calling Mr. Sheremet’s killing “terrible” and praising him as a journalist who “didn’t compromise with his conscience.” A knife-wielding man ran toward Maria Rydvan, a reporter for the Ukrainian version of Forbes magazine, in a park and stabbed her before fleeing. “It was all very strange,” Ms. Rydvan wrote on her Facebook page. The police issued a statement saying they were investigating.
Mr. Sheremet, 44, a onetime employee of Russian state television turned critic of the Kremlin, was among several prominent journalists who had moved from Russia to Ukraine, where restrictions on the news media are looser. Members of this group have also been highly critical of the new leadership in Ukraine.
Mr. Sheremet had been a reporter for ORT, the leading Russian state television channel, until 2008. In Ukraine, he had a program on Radio Vesti — he was on his way to the studio when he died — and wrote for Ukrainska Pravda, an online news outlet.
The car belonged to Mr. Sheremet’s girlfriend, Olena Prytula, a founding editor of Ukrainska Pravda, whose journalists, like others in the former Soviet Union, have been singled out for retribution. Speaking on Echo of Moscow, a radio station, on Wednesday morning, Mr. Sheremet’s colleagues speculated that Ms. Prytula might have been the intended target.
In 2000, a Ukrainska Pravda reporter, Georgiy Gongadze, who had been highly critical of the Ukrainian president at the time, Leonid Kuchma, was abducted and killed, a crime that still haunts Ukrainian journalists.
Yevgeny A. Kiselyov, another Russian television news star who set up shop in Ukraine after a crackdown on the press at home, told Dozhd television he had seen Mr. Sheremet only recently, and the two had planned to get together. “This is what is called ‘the meeting didn’t work out.’”
In the former Soviet countries, Mr. Kiselyov said, journalists are killed for a range of reasons, but the murders are rarely solved. That includes the 2006 killing of Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow.
“A journalist can be killed not only because he is carrying out a particular investigation, or he interviewed somebody who became offended,” Mr. Kiselyov said. “A journalist can be killed as an edifying lesson for others. It says ‘don’t try too much.’”