The journalist who came back to life
Last week, Arkady Babchenko “rose from the dead”, said The Guardian. The Russian journalist, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin who was living in exile in Ukraine, had apparently been shot dead outside his apartment in Kiev the day before. Ukrainian officials pointed the finger at Russia and leaked gruesome photos of him lying in a pool of blood. But at a press conference about the murder investigation, there was an unexpected star guest: Babchenko himself, sheepish but very much alive. His “death” had been concocted by the SBU, Ukraine’s security service, as part of an elaborate sting operation to expose a genuine attempt on his life, said The Independent. One person, a Ukrainian arms manufacturer, has been arrested as a result; Borys Herman had allegedly been paid $40,000 by Russian security services to arrange the hit.
“As dramatic plot twists go, it was top drawer,” said Shaun Walker in The Guardian. There were “gasps all round” at the press conference. Vigils for Babchenko turned into impromptu celebrations; obituaries were taken offline. One Ukrainian politician admiringly compared the operation to Sherlock Holmes’s faking of his own death. But incredulity and delight soon gave way to questions about the wisdom of deceiving the world’s media. “The next time a Kremlin critic is shot to death, or poisoned, or falls curiously from their balcony to die on the concrete below, the first question is always going to be: are they really dead?” We can expect the “Babchenko defence” to be Moscow’s stock response to reports or even photos of Russian atrocities for years to come.
Ukrainians are “thin-skinned about carping from outsiders”, said Edward Lucas in The Times. Their country, they point out, is effectively fighting a war with Russia’s “terrorist state”. They claim that letting the Russians think the murder had gone ahead produced a “harvest of intelligence from communications intercepts, including the identity of other assassination targets”. Even so, trying to match Russia’s dirty tricks and fake news in kind seems unwise. “Defending our societies against Putinism will be fruitless if we resort to Putinising ourselves.”