In a development seemingly torn from a bargain-basement spy novel, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko appeared alive at a press conference in Kiev last week, less than 24 hours after his death.
On May 29 Babchenko was reported by Kiev police to have been shot and mortally wounded in his apartment. According to accounts, Babchenko’s wife was in another room “when she heard what sounded like several loud claps” and entered to find her bloodied husband; it was announced that he died in the ambulance en route to hospital.
Babchenko has long been a thorn in the side of the Putin regime. A Russian journalist who served in Chechnya, he is widely known for his 2006 memoir One Soldier’s War, which includes detailed descriptions of the brutal system of dedovshchina, the murderous hazing of army recruits. He has spoken widely about the Russian propaganda of dehumanization that encouraged the elimination of Chechens and Georgians and, potentially, the people of Crimea and the Donbas. But Babchenko burned his bridges entirely, he thinks, when he committed the unpardonable lèse-majesté of publicly announcing, via Facebook, his refusal to offer thoughts and prayers regarding the December 2016 crash of the airplane carrying the Alexandrov military choir (formerly the Red Army Chorus) on its way to entertain Russian troops in Syria.
Instead he declined to exempt the choir from his judgment of the Russian armed forces as a whole. He reminded his readers that in Syria, Russia was an aggressor, bombing civilians in Aleppo, and that by the end of 2016 at least 10,000 people had been killed in attacks in eastern Ukraine. He condemned what he memorably called the “hypertrophied tolerance” that excused the Alexandrov on the grounds that members were “just singers and dancers.” And unsurprisingly, he was not only accused of insufficient patriotism—the choir, after all, echoes the Great Patriotic War in common memory—but was threatened with murder, threatened with legal action, and made a target of online “beat ’em up” rhetoric. Soon afterward, he relocated to Kiev.
On Wednesday, May 30, Vasyl Hrytsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), called a meeting to brief journalists on the assassination plot. According to Hrytsak, the SBU determined some time ago that a Ukrainian citizen had been paid $40,000 by the Russian security service (FSB) to organize the assassination of Babchenko and some 30 others in Ukraine. In the plot against Babchenko, the unidentified man hired a veteran of the war in eastern Ukraine to carry out the hit, taking a cut of about $10,000, and also undertook the purchase of numerous weapons per instructions received.
After eight minutes of video and slide illustrations of the plot evidence, Hrytsak startled his audience with a brief announcement, and to a chorus of gasps and applause produced an emotional Babchenko, who explained his participation in what was said to have been a successful sting operation.
Babchenko began by apologizing to his friends, colleagues, and especially his wife for their distress, as one who knows only too well the “sickening feeling” that follows sudden violent death. He thanked the SBU for saving his life, crediting them twice with having “worked hard like bulls” over the past month to foil the operation. “The crime is a proven fact. All the evidence is there,” he said, noting that “apart from saving my life, for which I’m very thankful, bigger and more serious terrorist attacks have been prevented.” “A week or two ago,” he added, “Russia announced that [Islamic State] were preparing terrorist attacks before the Champions League [soccer tournament in Kiev]. I think it was going to be my [assassination].”
Babchenko said that the origins of the plot were obvious. “I was shown my passport details and photo that exists only in my passport. I had this photo taken when I was 25. It exists only in my passport and [Russian] registry office. So it was clear that this information comes from Russian governmental services. Only special forces can obtain that kind of information.”
He finished by implying that he didn’t have much choice in the matter of the deception. “There were no other options: Either we do it or we do it anyway. There was pressure from [those who ordered the killing]. They only gave three weeks to do it.”
The most intriguing short-term consequence of the Babchenko affair may be the Russian response. Only hours before Babchenko appeared alive, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov condemned accusations of FSB involvement as “anti-Russian smears,” saying they reflected the “highest level of cynicism amid such a brutal murder, to shake the air in such a Russophobic way.” “We strongly condemn this killing and hope for a real and not a sham investigation into determining who ordered it,” he said.
Considering the vehemence and rapidity—not to mention the escalating ludicrousness—with which Russia denied involvement in the March poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in England, Peskov’s calling this a “brutal murder” sounds downright tenderhearted. And credulous. Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, whom Reuters quoted as having called the killing a tragedy, also seems to have believed sufficiently to reject Ukraine’s allegations in his usual manner.
In other words, it appears plausible that the Ukrainians may have pulled off their hoax without a leak to the Russians, which must be reassuring to the SBU. A glance at Putin’s habitually implacable expression, however, can’t be very reassuring. Imagine how much he and the FSB enjoy being fooled about anything at all, and figure out the exponent on this equation.
And if, as seems to be the case, there was indeed a Russian hit out on Babchenko, his status as a walking nose-thumb to the Kremlin can’t have made him safer; Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is said to have ordered round-the-clock protection.
Vladislav Davidzon, the Russian-American editor in chief of the English-language monthly Odessa Review, says the episode shows the “Russia-Ukraine conflict at its purest: grotesque, farcical, duplicitous, surreal,” and he cautions against drawing conclusions from it. It’s certainly plenty surreal. Early in the evening of May 30, Moscow authorities detained people who showed up for a planned commemoration of Babchenko, suggesting that they’d done so in bad faith, since he is, after all, not dead.
And Babchenko’s friends, family, and colleagues, glad to see him and certainly wise to the world’s many choices between doing something and doing it anyway, aren’t the only ones recovering from the events of May 29. Babchenko is a serious journalist, a sophisticated and ironical man who values his hard-earned reputation for probity. For a man who’s repeatedly risked his life to be truthful, being forced to participate in the promulgation of such a fundamental untruth before the eyes of the world must have been excruciating.
Babchenko materialized, revenant at the press conference, wearing a Journey hoodie. If he intended a subliminal suggestion that we don’t stop believing, one suspects he’s leaving it up to the observer to decide what, or whom, or when.
