July 29, 2016

Colleagues in Ukraine bid farewell to acclaimed journalist Pavel Sheremet

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Vladimir Gontar/UNIAN

At the public farewell to murdered journalist Pavel Sheremet held at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv on July 22.

KYIV – The method that assassins used to kill acclaimed journalist Pavel Sheremet on July 20 was at once unsettling and meant to intimidate journalists in Ukraine, his friends and colleagues said.

A car bomb that remotely detonated underneath the driver’s seat in which the 44-year-old Minsk-born journalist and radio host was sitting became the nation’s most high-profile murder of a reporter since Heorhii Gongadze was slain in 2000.

“Pavel Sheremet wasn’t simply an ordered hit. He was a sacred sacrifice,” said National Deputy Mustafa Nayyem who knew the deceased and had reported for Ukrayinska Pravda where the award-winning murdered journalist worked. “One can kill many ways – quietly, insidiously without… drawing attention to the process.”

The Subaru XV that Mr. Sheremet was driving – belonging to his partner and Ukrayinska Pravda manager Olena Prytula – exploded at a central Kyiv intersection, Mr. Nayyem said, “with such theatricality, …without a shot being fired… so that no one would doubt that it’s not just a murder, but a political assassination.”

Katya Gorchinskaya, CEO of independent Hromadske.tv and friend of the deceased, said Mr. Sheremet’s murder was part of a bigger “pattern that over the past year or more has unfolded against journalists.” In particular, she was referring to her colleague, Mykhailo Trach, who was attacked by officers of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in October 2015 – an act that has gone unpunished.

Writing on Facebook on July 20, she said: “The inaction, tacit and open support of those in power leads to an escalation of all sorts of attacks on journalists. Pasha’s [Mr. Sheremet’s nickname] murder wasn’t random. It killed the belief that we have freedom of speech. The dark times are here.”

However, Nataliya Lihachova, director of the media watchdog Media Detector, doesn’t think that the Sheremet murder will lead to self-censorship. She said it will have the opposite effect.

“As a rule, such bold assassinations and murders whose purpose is to obstruct professional activities are carried out against those journalists who foremost aren’t timid, and secondly inherently know perfectly well what they are doing,” she commented.

But such “repression” only evokes “a greater desire to get to the truth,” Ms. Lihachova said.

A joint open letter written by Vox Ukraine, a team of international and Ukraine-based scholars, policy-makers and businessmen devoted to promoting pro-democratic reform in Ukraine, said the Belarus native’s death signified the “battle between the world of free people and totalitarian dystopia.”

“In memory of him and all who have died and continue to die in this war and, above all, for the sake of those alive, we have no right to retreat,” read the letter released on July 25.

More than 50 journalists have been killed in Ukraine since 1991 when the country gained independence, excluding those who died in the war zone in the two easternmost oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk.

An investigative team of 50 law enforcement officers is treating the Sheremet case as premeditated murder, and the FBI has been enlisted to offer expertise, according to Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov. The American experts have so far examined the explosives and mechanics of the device, according to Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

Professional activity was given as the main motive for the killing. Mr. Lutsenko, citing surveillance video examined by investigators, said several people planted the explosive underneath Mr. Sheremet’s vehicle.

“The only thing I can say is that the killer was not alone. This was a group, and we can see part of this group on the video,” he told journalists on July 22.

Minister Avakov said Ukraine’s authorities are offering 200,000 hrv (about $8,000 U.S.) for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators of the murder.

Authorities have also not ruled out a “Russian trail” in the murder.

Journalists from the Russian Channel 17 were questioned, having been the first to report from the car explosion site soon after the incident took place at 7:45 a.m. on July 20, Internal Affairs Ministry adviser Ivan Varchenko told Hromadske TV on July 25. And chief military prosecutor Anatolii Matios noted that Mr. Sheremet had visited Moscow three weeks before his death to meet with friends of slain opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.

Mr. Varchenko said, “It is with this that a certain number of questions arise – why were representatives of Channel 17 the first at the crime scene, were they forewarned, did they know what was supposed to happen?”

Mr. Sheremet, who won numerous journalism awards during an illustrious career in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine since 2011, was critical of each country’s cronyism and ruling elite. He was known as a consummate professional, according to his Russian colleague Konstantin Eggert of Dozhd TV.

“He was a pioneer of reporting journalism, fact-based journalism and investigative journalism,” he said.

After moving to Kyiv, Mr. Sheremet started Istorychna Pravda, a sister site of Ukrayinska Pravda that is devoted to Ukrainian history. He hosted a weekday political talk show on Radio Vesti – he was headed there the morning he was killed. He also wrote a blog for Ukrayinska Pravda.

He understood that, unlike Belarus and Russia, Ukraine could “build a European state,” National Deputy Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist for Ukrayinska Pravda, told journalists of his slain friend on July 22 after the wake at Kyiv’s Ukrainian House.

“We spoke much about this, (and) he could insert a sharp word when he said that reforms weren’t being done. And he always said that it’s necessary to demand from the government that it carry out reforms and fight against corruption,” Mr. Leshchenko added.

A seemingly endless line formed during the three-hour wake with President Petro Poroshenko arriving 15 minutes before the pre-funeral ceremony ended. Sitting in the front row before the open casket was the deceased’s mother, Liudmila Sheremet, from Minsk, and his wife, Nataliya, from Moscow, whom he hadn’t divorced but from whom he was separated.

Thousands bid Mr. Sheremet farewell as an organized pile of roses, carnations and sunflowers steadily grew behind the open casket. Mr. Leshchenko was seen briefly consoling Ms. Prytula and was later joined by his colleague Mr. Nayyem. A projector beamed a movie screen-sized slide show of Mr. Sheremet, showing mostly glowing, happy snapshots of him.

Beside the casket, a candle was lit atop a small semi-circular table alongside a black-and-white portrait photo of Mr. Sheremet.

The following day, he was buried in Minsk at the Northern Cemetery following a funeral procession at the All Saints Church.

A ribbon attached to a wreath of flowers from Ms. Prytula said the following: “Smile up there, my dear. They will not stop us.”

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