Dissident Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko said on Thursday he collaborated in a plot to fake his own death because he feared being targeted for assassination like former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.
Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday night that Babchenko, a Kremlin critic, had been gunned down in his apartment building in Kiev. Pictures of his body in a pool of blood were published and officials suggested Russia was behind the assassination, something Moscow flatly denied.
A day later, Babchenko walked to the podium at a televised news briefing about his death. Ukrainian security officials said they staged his apparent murder to thwart and expose a Russian plot to assassinate him.
That drew criticism from some media defenders and commentators who questioned whether the ruse and the false outpouring of grief and finger-pointing at Russia it generated had undermined credibility in journalism itself and in Kiev, handing the Kremlin a propaganda gift in the process.
Babchenko hit back in a joint interview in Kiev on Thursday, saying that he had gone along with the ruse, organized by Ukrainian security officials, because he feared for his life.
“Everyone who says this undermines trust in journalists: what would you do in my place, if they came to you and said there is a hit out on you?” Babchenko said, saying concerns about his life had to take precedence over worries about journalistic ethics.
Babchenko said he was exhausted after playing out the elaborate ruse. When Ukrainian security officials had approached him with information about a Russian plot to kill him, “my first reaction was: ‘To hell with you, I want to pack a bag and disappear to the North Pole.’”
“But then I realized, where do you hide? Skripal also tried to hide,” he said.
British authorities say that Skripal, a former Russian double agent, was poisoned in March with a military-grade nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury where he lived after leaving Russia in a spy swap.
Britain says Russia is culpable for the poisoning, an allegation Moscow denies.
Babchenko said he now lived in a secure location and felt safe for now.
His reported murder kindled a war of words between Ukraine and Russia, which have been at loggerheads since a popular revolt in Ukraine in 2014 toppled a Russian-backed government in favor of a pro-Western one.
It also produced international condemnation, in part because several prominent Russians critical of Putin have been murdered in recent years, three of them in Ukraine. Opposition groups and human rights organizations say the Kremlin is behind the killings. The Kremlin denies this.
