On the thawing March morning he died, Denis Voronenkov stood on Shevchenko Boulevard, a broad poplar-lined street in central Kyiv named after Ukraine’s national poet, his eyes glued to his phone. The 45-year-old former Russian lawmaker and security agent was promoting an interview he had given to a local news site about the life he left behind in Moscow months earlier. Given his past in Russia’s notoriously tight-lipped security services, it was particularly treasonous of him to open his mouth, while the sheer symbolism of his desertion gave his proclamations eminence. “The system is killing people,” he told the journalist, “and the reverse evolution makes the intelligent and worthy either stay silent or flee. I am not the first and I am not the last who tried to gnaw out their place in the sun in Russia.”
New York Times: It looked like another Kremlin assassination. Was it?
Anatoly Matios, the chief military prosecutor, holds Maria Maksakova, wife of Denis Voronenkov, as she reacts near his body in the center of Kyiv on March 23, 2017.
