In a bizarre sting operation that set the world’s media abuzz, the Security Service of Ukraine falsely announced the murder of Russian dissident journalist in Kyiv, justifying the fake crime as part of a special operation to uncover a Kremlin plot to kill at least 30 other people.
The reported grisly murder of war correspondent and Kremlin critic in exile Arkady Babchenko in his apartment building in Kyiv on May 29 shocked Ukraine and the world.
News topped the international headlines and brought condemnation from the Russian government, the top suspect. Memorial events for Babchenko were held in Kyiv and Moscow. Russia even opened an investigation into the killing of its citizen.
But the world was in for a yet another shock one day later, on May 30, when Babchenko showed up alive and well at a briefing at the SBU security service’s headquarters in Kyiv.
He claimed that there had been an actual plot to kill him, and that staging his death was the only way to capture the man who was trying to have him assassinated. The suspect was identified as a Ukrainian citizen who was allegedly paid $40,000 by Russia to hire a killer.
‘Brilliant operation’
During the hours that Babchenko had been thought to be dead, no one suspected it might all have been a ruse.
Ayder Muzhdabaev, Babchenko’s friend and the deputy general director of television channel ATR, where the journalist had worked for the past seven months, was the first to break the news of the “killing.” Later he said was unaware of the operation and cited Babchenko’s wife as his source.
A gory photo allegedly showing Babchenko lying face down in a puddle of blood with gunshot wounds to his back circulated on social media soon after the first reports. On the same day, the police released a sketch of the suspected killer, unusually quickly. Reports said it resembled one of Babchenko’s neighbors.
After Babchenko showed up alive at a May 30 press conference, SBU chief Vasyl Hrytsak said the staging the Russian journalist’s assassination had been the only way to unmask the assassins. He said his agency had uncovered a plan hatched by the Russian security services to assassinate Russian citizens who had fled because of their opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Most of the targets were journalists and civil activists. Babchenko had been first on the list of 30 people, Hrytsak said.
The Ukrainian citizen arrested as a suspect hired a Donbas war veteran, who went to Ukrainian investigators and helped them stage the murder.
As proof, law enforcers showed a video of the alleged intermediary paying the first installment of $15,000 to the killer. The footage didn’t show the men’s faces, only their hands, as they were counting cash while sitting in a car. The men could be heard talking about the deal: The rest of the money was to be paid after the murder.
Another video presented by the SBU showed the arrest of the alleged intermediary near Olympiyska metro station in Kyiv, just three hours before the briefing on May 30. The Donbas war veteran was named a witness in the case because of his cooperation with the authorities.
A new twist
The story became even more convoluted when the names of both the intermediary and the killer-turned-SBU double agent became known next day, on May 31.
On that day, Shevchenkinvsky District Court in Kyiv began the trial of Borys German, the arrested suspect. German, 50, is a former aide of ex-Party of Regions lawmaker Ihor Plokhhiy and an acting director of Schmeiser, a Ukrainian-German private arms production company that has won many contracts with the Defense Ministry of Ukraine.
German’s lawyer Yevgeniy Solodko wrote on May 31 that the correspondence between his client and the would-be assassin didn’t mention any offer from him to kill Babchenko.
“What arguments does the SBU have to keep him under arrest? If you believe their documents, they haven’t even identified the organizers of the murder. They remain unknown,” Solodko wrote.
Moreover, he noted, the SBU hasn’t released the list of 30 people supposedly targeted for assassination.
Priest and Donbas volunteer fighter Oleksiy Tsymbalyuk claimed in a Facebook post on May 31 that he was the hired killer and a double agent of the SBU.
“After the SBU revealed the video of me getting paid for killing a person, without even altering my voice, I see no reason to hide,” he wrote.
Tsymbaluk praised the SBU’s investigators and said they, indeed, prevented Babchenko’s murder.
Solodko said the self-proclaimed assassin had been the one to propose murders to his client, German.
“He even offered to kill (Russian defector Ilya) Bogdanov, as apparently he had hated him since 2014,” Solodko wrote.
Provocations
Bogdanov, an ex-FSB officer and blogger, defected from Russia after the annexation of Crimea, and joined the war against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas in 2014. He allegedly figured in yet another SBU sting operation.
In 2016, Bogdanov was supposedly saved by the SBU from being kidnapped and executed in Russia. The SBU even presented video evidence of his rescue, but later it emerged that the video had been staged.
When it emerged that the SBU had released a video reconstruction of Bogdanov’s alleged kidnapping rather than the actual event, the security service said it had intended only to illustrate what had happened in reality.
Babchenko didn’t rule out that the alleged Russian plot to kill him might also have been faked in order to smear Russia.
“It might have been a provocation. But I doubt that the security forces of a country at war have so much free time. So I would prefer to believe it was all real,” Babchenko said during the press conference on May 31.
Babchenko thanked law enforcers for saving his life and apologized to his wife. He said the SBU informed him about the plot and he had no choice but to cooperate with the security service in a counter-operation.
“I’m very expensive,” Babchenko joked, referring to the thousands of dollars the Russians allegedly offered for his murder.
President Petro Poroshenko, who knew about the operation, described it as “brilliant” and said that Babchenko would now be provided with around-the-clock security.
‘A pathetic stunt’
Although relieved that Babchenko was alive, many in the public, media and international community felt duped by the SBU’s claimed special operation.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said nothing could justify faking a journalist’s murder and called the op “a pathetic stunt.” “This journalist’s reappearance is a great relief, but it was distressing and regrettable that the Security Service of Ukraine played with the truth,” Christophe Deloire said in a written statement. Was such a scheme really necessary? There can be no grounds for faking a journalist’s death.”
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Special Representative for Media Freedom Harlem Désir condemned the attack and immediately left for Kyiv to pay his condolences to Babchenko’s widow — only to find out it was a hoax.
“I deplore the decision to spread false information about the life of a journalist. It is the duty of the state to provide correct information to the public,” he tweeted on May 30.
The outrage of journalists and media watchdogs was understandable: having trusted official sources, they were manipulated and became complicit in spreading fake news. Only this time the fake news had been manufactured by Ukraine, a country that has been fighting Russian disinformation for years.
Writer Anne Applebaum in an op-ed for the Washington Post opined that Ukrainian security services, under the direct control of Poroshenko, were no better than their enemies, the Russians.
“Nobody thought about the collateral damage; nobody asked whether anybody will believe the security services the next time that they tell us a journalist is dead,” she wrote. “In a country where journalists really do get murdered, it’s not clear whether anybody will believe journalists either.”
Having been falsely accused of murdering an exiled critic in Ukraine, the Kremlin, on the other hand, seized on the propaganda gift. Spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova called Babchenko’s staged murder “a performance” and “propaganda.”
“It’s time to accept it: anti-Russian hysteria is the only thing that allows the nationalist dictatorship in Ukraine to govern,” Zakharova wrote in a post on Facebook on May 30.
Russian officials also used the Babchenko case to cast doubt on other accusations against Russia, such as the Sergey Skripal poisoning case in the United Kingdom earlier this year.
More questions
Along with reporting the Ukrainian law enforcers’ success at the May 30 press conference, Lutsenko took the opportunity to slam the most famous critics of Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies.
“No, it is not true that terrorist attacks are not being investigated in Ukraine, no, it is not true that Ukraine has become a place where Russia can do whatever it wants and top crimes remain unsolved in Ukraine,” Lutsenko said emotionally, answering earlier criticism about the lack of progress in investigations into actual killings, such as that of former Russian lawmaker Denis Voronenkov, journalist Pavel Sheremet and dozens of protesters during the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014.
“So please stop manipulating and throwing stones at those (investigators and prosecutors), who have been working hard day and night to bring justice to Ukraine,” Lutsenko said.
Lutsenko even read out critical Facebook posts by top Ukrainian politicians and lawmakers — all, coincidentally, potential rivals or critics of Poroshenko and his government.
Former Defense Minister Anatoly Grytsenko, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, former head of the anti-corruption committee in parliament Yegor Soboliev and many others had attacked Ukrainian law enforcers in social media, blaming them for allowing yet another journalist to be killed in Ukraine.
Lutsenko’s aide and spokeswoman Larysa Sargan also composed a list of people who had attacked Ukraine’s prosecutors on social media and published it on Facebook on May 30.
“I can hardly imagine the same attacks on British Prime Minister Theresa May from U.K. opposition politicians and civil society after she failed to catch the attackers of the Skripals,” Lutsenko said. “And that is why Britain is strong.”
All the same, Ukraine’s record in solving top crimes, including assassinations, remains poor.
Chechen fighter and Donbas war veteran Amina Okuyeva was shot in Kyiv Oblast in October 2017. Georgian citizen and Donbas war veteran Timur Makhauri, a personal enemy of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov — died from a car bomb in September. Russian lawmaker Denis Voronenkov, who fled Russia to Kyiv with his wife Maria Maksakova, was gunned down on a Kyiv street in March 2017.
And the murder of Sheremet, who died in a car bomb blast in July 2016, still remains unsolved.
An international team of journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Ukrainian investigative program Slidstvo.info showed that the police investigation had missed obvious clues in the Sheremet case.
The journalists found a possible witness of the crime — an ex-SBU officer caught on CCTV near Sheremet’s house the night before the killing who was in a position to observe those who planted the explosive device under Sheremet’s car. He wasn’t even questioned by the police.
It is still unclear whether Babchenko’s faked murder was necessary to identify the organizer of the murder, Anna Babinets, OCCRP editor in Ukraine and one of the authors of the “Killing Pavel” documentary on the Sheremet case told the Kyiv Post on May 31.
“To me it looks like an unnecessary theater. Also to stage murder of a journalist in a country where journalists have really been killed, and their killings remain unsolved, looks like something beyond good and evil,” Babinets said.
