A Russian Critic of Putin Is Assassinated in Ukraine
By ANDREW E. KRAMERMARCH 23, 2017
Investigators around the body of Denis N. Voronenkov, a former Russian lawmaker who was killed in Kiev, Ukraine, on Thursday. Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
KIEV, Ukraine — A former Russian lawmaker who fled to Ukraine last year was gunned down on a sidewalk in Kiev on Thursday morning, the latest in a string of politically hued murders of critics of the Russian government abroad, going back more than a decade.
The killing coincided with a fire and explosion at a gigantic Ukrainian Army ammunition depot in the country’s east that the authorities blamed on Russia, suggesting an escalation of Russian special operations inside Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko, said it was “no accident” that the killing of the lawmaker, Denis N. Voronenkov, occurred at the same time as the ammunition depot explosion. Ukraine’s military said a drone may have touched off the blast, near the city of Kharkiv, sending tank shells firing in all directions and forcing the evacuation of 20,000 people.
Though the Kiev police said it was too early to determine a motive in the killing, Mr. Poroshenko blamed the Russian government for “an act of state terrorism.”
Mr. Voronenkov Oleksandr Synytsia/Associated Press
Mr. Voronenkov was member of the Russian Parliament before defecting to Ukraine last year with his wife, Maria Maksakova, a fellow Russian politician and a Bolshoi opera singer, saying they were escaping political prosecution.
In Kiev, the couple had kept a high profile, speaking out frequently against Russian policy in Ukraine. But the Russian authorities accused them of corruption, and said they had left to avoid prosecution.
In Ukraine, Mr. Voronenkov had promised to testify for the prosecution in a criminal case against Ukraine’s former Russia-aligned president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, and to provide an insider’s information about Russian government deliberations and actions during the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
In his statement, Mr. Poroshenko called Mr. Voronenkov “one of the main witnesses of Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
For a contract murder, a common occurrence in former Soviet countries usually executed with precision, the killing in Kiev was unusually bloody and chaotic.
Maria Maksakova, with the police, reacting after the assassination of her husband, Mr. Voronenkov.Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The shooting occurred just as Mr. Voronenkov was walking to an upscale Kiev hotel, Premier Palace. The assassin opened fire with what the police said was a TT pistol, a Soviet-era design, and Mr. Voronenkov’s bodyguard fired back.
In total, the police say, the two fired at least 20 shots a few yards apart, leaving spots of blood and shell casings scattered around the sidewalk. Hours later, the body of Mr. Voronenkov, his tan dress shoes still protruding from a black tarpaulin, remained on the spot as the police investigated.
Mr. Voronenkov was hit four times and died at the scene, according to Yuri Lutsenko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general. The bodyguard was shot in the chest but survived. The assassin was captured after sustaining a head wound, but later died at a hospital.
Mr. Lutsenko said Mr. Voronenkov could have been killed to prevent the embarrassing court testimony against Mr. Yanukovych, who is being tried in absentia, or because Mr. Voronenkov knew details about money laundering schemes used by the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the K.G.B.
“This was the demonstrative murder of a witness, common for the Kremlin,” Mr. Lutsenko said.
Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, said in an interview that he and Mr. Voronenkov had discussed opening a nongovernment group in Kiev to study Russian corruption. “He knew everything about everybody” in Russia, Mr. Gerashchenko said.
A Ukrainian police official removing a gun from the scene of the killing. Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Voronenkov had worked as a prosecutor in Russia before joining Parliament and socialized with close aides to President Vladimir V. Putin. Vladislav Surkov, a senior political adviser to Mr. Putin, had attended Mr. Voronenkov’s wedding.
The brazen daytime assassination was chosen, Mr. Gerashchenko said, because “they want to show that anybody who wants to run away from Russia will be liquidated at any cost.”
In Russia, Mr. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri S. Peskov, denied any Russian involvement. “We consider any accusations of the notorious Russian trace to be absurd,” he said.
Mr. Voronenkov’s former colleagues in the Russian Parliament suggested a more elaborate theory. Two used the phrase “sacred sacrifice,” which in the Russian political world means the murder of an ally with the aim of pinning the blame on an enemy.
Contract killings in Russia are often carried out with a theatrical flourish or significant timing, to amplify the message. When the Russian opposition leader Boris Y. Nemtsov was shot to death in 2015, his body fell on the sidewalk of a bridge with the red brick walls of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral, symbols of the Russian state, as a backdrop.
Mr. Voronenkov knew he was a target for assassination, according to multiple interviews he gave in the weeks before his death. In the last, in Gordon, a Ukrainian news site, posted at 10 a.m., about an hour and a half before the murder, Mr. Voronenkov said he might be “killed like Bandera,” a reference to the K.G.B.’s poisoning of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist leader, in Munich, Germany, in 1959.
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