President Volodymyr Zelensky has questioned the chief of Ukraine’s National Police on progress in the investigation of the 2016 murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet. The president said he expects to see the crime solved.
At a briefing on July 23, National Police Chief Serhiy Knyazev reportedly told the president and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov that details of the ongoing case were secret and could not be made public. As a result, Zelensky, Knyazev, and Avakov went into a different room to discuss the case.
Later, Zelensky returned to journalists and said: “From what I’ve seen, I can say we will have a result but I can’t say when.”
These were the first semi-public statements on the investigation into Sheremet’s murder in more than two years.
The Belarus-born journalist, who spent the last four years of his life working in Kyiv, was killed by a car bomb in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016. Since then, his friends and former colleagues have demanded that the authorities bring his killers to justice. So far, their calls have gone unanswered. In September 2017, police made the murder case secret.
Watch: Killing Pavel
“We understand that society expects results, but, at this time, it is premature to give them,” Knyazev said.
Detectives have several ideas about the motives behind the murder, the police chief said. They have also been trying to identify the suspected hitmen, who were caught on CCTV.
One theory that law enforcement is investigating proposes that Sheremet was targeted for his journalistic work. Before moving to Ukraine, he had reported on political matters in Belarus and Russia and was critical of the leadership of these countries.
Another theory is that the murder was designed to sow unrest in Ukraine.
Knyazev said that Russian security service agents had targeted former Ukrainian servicemen who took part in the 2008 Russian-Georgian war in a series of plotted revenge killings. In 2016, a hitman killed ex-military spy Ivan Mamchur in the western Ukrainian city of Rivne. Earlier this year, The New York Times published an investigation into the case.
One of the links that police are looking into is Sheremet’s 2009 book, “Ruined Dreams,” on Russian-Georgian relations and the war, Knyazev said.
Sheremet was also friends with the assassinated Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. The two worked together on the book “Rebel’s Confession.”
Knyazev said the Ukrainian police were scrutinizing connections between Sheremet and Nemtsov, sources of funding for the book’s publication, and how they spent grants from different foundations.
Another theory speculates that Sheremet was killed by mistake, and the target had been his romantic partner, Olena Prytula, also a prominent journalist and publisher of the Ukrainska Pravda independent new website. An improvised bomb was planted under her car, which Sheremet was driving on the morning of his death. A year before his murder, Sheremet and Prytula had reported being followed to police, Knyazev said.
Zelensky issued his summons to Ukraine’s law enforcement chiefs on July 20, the third anniversary of Sheremet’s murder. All but one showed up to the debriefing on July 23: Knyazev, Avakov, and security agency chief Ivan Bakanov. Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had gone on vacation the previous day.
The staff of Ukrainska Pravda, where Sheremet had worked, have called on Lutsenko, Avakov, and Knyazev to resign.
