Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians woke up on the morning of July 20 to the horrifying news that prominent journalist Pavel Sheremet, known for his work in all three countries, had been killed in a car-bomb blast in central Kyiv.
As the most high-profile murder of a journalist since the killing of Georgiy Gongadze in 2000, it has plunged the wider journalist community into a state of shock.
For the past several years, Sheremet worked for Ukrainska Pravda, the news website founded by Gongadze. It was the first one to report Sheremet’s death.
At the time of the explosion, Sheremet was driving the car of Olena Prytula, his partner and a founding editor of Ukrainska Pravda, leading some to suspect that the killers had targeted Prytula.
Originally from Belarus, Sheremet was a prominent critic of both the Russian and Belarusian regimes.
After moving to Kyiv five years ago, he devoted much of his work at Ukrainska Pravda to exposing corruption.
Sheremet hosted a weekday morning political talk show on Radio Vesti, to which he was driving when he was killed. Midway through the show, his stunned co-host Tatyana Ivanskaya had to announce his death live on air.
Sheremet’s murder falls under the long shadow cast by the killing of Gongadze, whose torture and beheading sparked a wave of discontent with then-President Leonid Kuchma that partly led to the 2004 Orange Revolution.
A surveillance camera video shows the explosion that killed journalist Pavel Sheremet about 7:45 a.m. on July 20 in Kyiv as he was driving to host his daily radio program on Radio Vesti.
Eyewitness reports
Eyewitnesses told the Kyiv Post that Sheremet had stopped to let a car pass on the corner of Ivana Franko Street and Bohdan Khmelnytskiy Street when the explosion occurred.
Minutes after the explosion, at 7:42 a.m., taxi driver Anatoliy Viter, who was standing opposite a nearby McDonald’s drinking a coffee, rang the police on 102. By that point the car was engulfed in a cloud of smoke, he said.
Oleksandr Rotan, a waiter from the Device Club restaurant, which stands opposite the scene of the blast, ran out to rescue Sheremet. Together with other bystanders, he helped pull the mortally injured journalist from the car.
“It sounded like a shell,” Rotan said of the blast, adding that Sheremet was still alive, though unconscious immediately after the blast.
The strength of the explosion was clear from the scene of the crime. Prytula’s car, a Subaru SUV, was gutted and wreckage from the car was strewn across the crossroads. There was a hole visible beneath the vehicle’s driver’s seat.
A remote controlled explosive device was used, according to an advisor to the Ukrainian Security Services Yuriy Tandit. The explosive device, he said, had been strapped under the driver’s seat.
After a few seconds, several bystanders rushed over to help drag the journalist from the car’s smoking wreckage.
“He could barely breathe and was gasping for breath,” Viter said. When asked if he was alive after being pulled from the car, Viter replied: “If you can call that alive.”
Viter told the Kyiv Post that Sheremet died less than 10 minutes after being pulled from the car.
Investigation so far
Shortly after the car blast, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said that traces of explosive had been found at the scene.
The Head of the National Police, Khatia Dekanoidze, later said that 400-600 grams of TNT had been used in the bomb.
Dekanoidze said it would be “matter of honor” for the police to investigate this case, Ukrainska Pravda reported.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has also enlisted the help of the FBI. U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed that the FBI has begun to assist in the investigation.
Potential suspects and motives behind the murder have been circulating, but the possibilities seem endless. Tandit told journalists that at present they are considering four basic motives: Sheremet’s professional activities, his relationships or personal motives, involvement of Russians authorities, or the attempted assassination of the car’s owner, Prytula.
In November Prytula wrote on Facebook that her apartment was being watched by people with a “particular look.” She said she was certain of it, as the same had happened before the Gongadze murder. Since then, however, neither Prytula nor Sheremet made any fresh complaints, according to Ukrainska Pravda editor Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk.
Prosecutor Lutsenko said that the investigators are probing two versions of events – an assassination and a terrorist attack with the intent of destabilizing the political situation in Ukraine.
But prominent journalist and friend of Sheremet, Bohdan Kutiepov, told the Kyiv Post at MediaHub, where people were invited to pay their respects to the slain journalist, that the assassination constituted an attack against Ukraine’s entire free press, of which Sheremet was a key voice.
“It’s not who did it, but what they’ve tried to attack,” said Kutiepov. “The victim was Pavel, but also it was designed to threaten Olena (Prytula) and Ukrainska Pravda. To show that this isn’t a joke.”
Heartfelt messages of condolences and memories have been pouring out from journalists, officials and politicians.
“Pavel was a clever and brave man, an excellent journalist and all in all a good person. That is how we will remember him,” Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny wrote on his blog. Sheremet was also a close friend of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated outside the Kremlin in February of 2015.
A courageous career
Born in Minsk in 1972, Sheremet became famous in his 20s for criticizing the increasingly authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. He kept up his criticism, despite being threatened, imprisoned, and eventually exiled to Russia.
In 1995, he became editor of business newspaper Belarusskaya Delovaya Gazeta. In the same year he won the Belarus PEN Center’s Adamovich Prize for his reporting for Russian public television station ORT. Russian TV channels were one of the only sources of critical information for many Belarusians during that period.
In 1997, Sheremet’s press accreditation was revoked by the Belarusian authorities after he refused to apologize for calling the nation’s rescheduled Independence Day “President Lukashenko’s idea.”
The following year, Sheremet and his camera crew were arrested by the Belarusian authorities for filming a feature on smuggling at the Belarus-Lithuania border. They had applied for permission, didn’t receive a reply, and chose to go anyway. The authorities were angered by Sheremet showing the ease with which smugglers could cross the border. Together with another colleague, he was prosecuted and imprisoned for three months of their two-year sentence. His imprisonment sparked an international incident between Belarus and Russia as then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin personally demanded his release.
It was after this 1998 incident that the Committee to Protect Journalists gave Sheremet their annual International Press Freedom Award. Unable to collect the prize at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, because of a one-year travel ban, Sheremet said in a video message at the time:
“The investigation against me and my colleagues on a pretext impossible anywhere in the civilized world, was just an example of how the government treats the mass media in Belarus. My personal experience is proof that this pressure is hard to withstand and dangerous.”
From 1999, Sheremet continued to work for ORT but in Moscow (the station was later renamed Russia’s First Channel), as a presenter of the news program Vremya. At that point, Russia’s democratic institutions were still active.
But in 2008, he left after writing an op-ed for Russia’s Vedomosti newspaper titled “Russia is Heading Down the Same Path as Belarus.” He later said he regretted working at the paper in the lead up to the parliamentary elections, as its coverage had been far from fair.
From 2008 until moving to Kyiv in 2011, Sheremet worked as an editor at Russian magazine Ogoniok and spent his last year in Moscow working as a presenter on Russian channel REN TV’s Prigovor. It was during this period that he was stripped of his Belarusian citizenship under the pretext that he already held Russian citizenship – though dual citizenship is not banned under Belarusian law.
Sheremet was quickly welcomed into the Kyiv journalist community, with which he had built up links over the years. Shortly after joining Ukrainska Pravda, he founded Istorychna Pravda – a sister site dedicated to Ukrainian history.
He also founded Belarus Partisan, a website focused on objective coverage of Belarus.
Sheremet was the author of three books and several documentaries. In 2002, he won the OSCE prize for journalism and democracy in part for his film “Wild Hunt” on persecution of the opposition by the Belarusian authorities.
In an obituary to Sheremet published by Meduza – a Latvia-based website run by independent Russian journalists who have fled President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on the media in recent years – Sheremet’s friend, journalist Katerina Gordeeva praised his ability to revive himself after painful layoffs linked to shrinking freedom of speech.
The biography of Pavel Sheremet is without a doubt the history of an entire generation of Russian journalists who lost their jobs because of circumstances beyond their control and the fidelity of their beliefs,” wrote Gordeeva.
Kyiv Post staff writers Veronika Melkozerova, Yuliana Romanyshyn and Anna Yakutenko contributed reporting to this story.
