Arkady Babchenko: how Putin’s enemies often end up dead

Journalist who fled Russia after
criticising the Kremlin shot in the back

In Depth

Babchenko fled his homeland in 2017, saying it was “a
country I no longer feel safe in”. He said that senior politicians
had called for his deportation, and that his home address was
published online, after he publicly criticising Russia’s military actions in Syria.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has blamed Ukraine for Babchenko’s
death, and wants an independent investigation.

However, Ayder Muzhdabaev, a friend of the murdered journalist,
pointed out to Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform that Babchenko
had not written about Ukrainian affairs, bur rather “about the
Russian government, about their actions, about their criminal
activities, that’s all”.

Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker who serves as adviser
to the interior minister, said investigators would examine “the
actions of Russian intelligence agencies to get rid of those who
are trying to tell the truth”.

Babchenko’s death is “the latest in a series of attacks, many of
them fatal, on outspoken foes of President Vladimir V. Putin, both
inside Russia and beyond”, says The New York Times.

Skripals and Litvinenko

The UK government blamed Russia for the nerve agent attack on
double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in
Salisbury earlier this year. The Foreign Office said it had
taken Russia’s “record of conducting state-sponsored
assassinations” into account when making that assessment.

The Salisbury attack has drawn comparison to the 2006 murder of
former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko using radioactive
polonium-210, thought to have been administered in a cup of tea
during a meeting at a London hotel. The UK public inquiry into
Litvinenko’s death said there was a “strong probability” that his
killers, two Russian agents, were acting on behalf of their
country’s FSB secret service.

In 2017, BuzzFeed News identified 14 deaths of Russians
or Russian-linked individuals in Britain, and pointed to several
further unsolved deaths in the US. Ukraine has also recorded
multiple suspected assassinations in the past few years.

Russia’s ‘wetwork’

The Kremlin vehemently denies such attacks, although in 2010
Putin chillingly warned that “traitors will kick the bucket”.

Targeted killings have often been used to “undermine foreign
countries and send important psychological messages to opponents
and ‘traitors’”, says Dan Lomas, programme leader for the MA in
intelligence and security studies at the University of Salford.

Writing on The Conversation, Lomas says: “Russia’s use of
‘wetwork’ (from the Russian mokroye delo, literally ‘wet
affairs’, referring to the spilling of blood) has long been a part
of Russian intelligence history.

“What began with the Cheka, the first Soviet security agency,
continued to the NKVD, SMERSH (drawn from the phrase smert
shpionam, meaning ‘death to spies’), the KGB, and its
successors in the modern day FSB and SVR (the Russian foreign
intelligence service).”

Unearthing the truth about the long list of suspicious deaths is
“difficult in the extreme”, says Reuters, and it “might be simplistic to suggest
Putin ordered all of the killings”.

The news site notes, however, that “despite Russia’s denials, it
is unquestionably true that Kremlin enemies often end up dead”.