High profile Ukrainian journalist Pavel Sheremet dies in car explosion

Alex Christoforou
The Duran
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:51 UTC

Prominent journalist Pavel Sheremet murdered in Kiev car bombing.

Journalist Pavel Sheremet has died in Kiev when the car he was driving blew up minutes after it started.

Dead bodies of journalists and politicians continue to pile up in Ukraine. US and EU governments remain completely silent, afraid that such attacks on the press may destroy the false narrative built around Ukraine that they have so carefully constructed.

Nevertheless, the suspicious killings of prominent opposition supporters and journalists continues to grow.

Today news came in through the wires that well-known Russian journalist Pavel Sheremet died in Kiev when the car he was driving blew up minutes after it started.

The vehicle belonged to his employer, the head of Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper.

RT reports further, on what can only be described as a mafia style hit job taken out of a hollywood script.

The killing of the journalist in Kiev is murder, with a bomb planted in the car he was in, the Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office has said. "No doubt the blast was caused by an explosive device implanted by malefactors. Evidently, the bomb had either a frequency-induction fuse or clock-operated bomb," Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian MP and aide to the interior minister, told 112 Ukraine channel.

The explosion occurred at about 7:45am, after Sheremet got into the car, started the engine and drove several dozen meters. He was killed instantly. The vehicle has completely burnt out.

The vehicle belonged to Alyona Pritula, the founder and chief editor of Ukrainskaya Pravda media outlet. She was not inside the vehicle at the moment of explosion.

President Petro Poroshenko offered his condolences in a Twitter post, saying he is "shocked"and "has no other words."He added that he personally knew the journalist.

Sheremet was a well-known Russian journalist and political analyst specializing in relations between Russia and Ukraine, as well as developments in former Soviet republics. Over the last five years, Sheremet lived and worked in Ukraine, employed by the UP.

Pavel Sheremet car wreckage

The media company was founded in 2000 by Pritula and Georgy Gongadze, a Ukrainian journalist of Georgian origin who was assassinated on September 17, 2000.

As recently as May, Ukraine was rocked by a big scandal after the personal data of more than 4,000 media staff were posted online by Ukrainian 'witch-hunting' website Mirotvorets supported by the aide to Ukraine's interior minister. The employees were accused by pro-Kiev activists of "collaborating with terrorists" for their reporting from war-torn eastern Ukraine.

The list included the names of people working for such as news agencies AFP, AP and Reuters, broadcasters BBC, CNN, CCTV, Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera, newspapers including the New York Times, Gazeta Wyborcza and Kyiv Post, websites Vice News and Daily Beast, and many others. RT journalists are on the list too.

Many journalists on the list said they received threats following the publication.

The leak was widely condemned by governments, NGOs and journalists across the globe.

Last April, Ukraine saw the killing of opposition journalist and writer Oles Buzina, who was assassinated near his house in Kiev. Police believe it could have been a contract killing, which happened right after the vicious murder of another Ukrainian journalist, Sergey Sukhobok.

And in 2014, Russian photo journalist Andrey Stenin, who had been missing in eastern Ukraine for a month, was confirmed dead as his charred remains were found in his vehicle. He died while traveling in a convoy of civilians escaping from the warzone in eastern Ukraine.

The same year, Russian journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin were killed near Lugansk, eastern Ukraine, when they came under determined mortar fire from the Ukrainian military.

Not taking into account journalists murdered by the Ukraine military in 2014 (Russian photo journalist Andrey Stenin, and Russian journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin), from January 29th 2015, 11 (eleven) politicians and journalists, critical of the Ukraine putsch government have been mysteriously murdered.

• January 29, 2015: Former Chairman of the local government of the Kharkov region, Alexey Kolesnik, hanged himself.
• February 24, 2015: Stanislav Melnik, a member of the opposition party (Partia Regionov), shot himself.
• February 25, 2015: The Mayor of Melitopol, Sergey Valter, hanged himself a few hours before his trial.
• February 26, 2015: Alexander Bordiuga, deputy director of the Melitopol police, was found dead in his garage.
• February 26, 2015: Alexander Peklushenko, former member of the Ukrainian parliament, and former mayor of Zaporizhi, was found shot to death.
• February 28, 2015: Mikhail Chechetov, former member of parliament, member of the opposition party (Partia Regionov), "fell" from the window of his 17th floor apartment in Kiev.
• March 14, 2015: The 32-year-old prosecutor in Odessa, Sergey Melnichuk, "fell" to his death from the 9th floor.
• April 13, 2015: Sergei Sukhobok, a journalist from Donetsk region, was found dead in Kiev, reportedly killed in a fight with neighbors in the Ukrainian capital.
• April 15, 2015: Oleg Kalashnikov, a former Ukrainian MP and a vocal critic of the country's ruling government was murdered in Kiev, found dead of a gunshot wound on the landing of his apartment.
• April 16, 2015: Oles Buzyna, a 45- year-old journalist, critical of Poroshenko's government, shot dead in the street. Buzina's body was found on the ground near his apartment close to the city center.
• July 20th, 2016: Pavel Sheremet died in Kiev when the car he was driving blew up minutes after it started.

Russia's MFA spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that this, unfortunately, is only the beginning of political purges in Ukraine:

"It is scary because none of the leaders in the EU will take notice that, day after day politicians are being killed in Ukraine. Let's try and find at least 20 tweets of foreign ministers of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Sweden, the UK, Canada, USA, and Australia, representatives of the OSCE, EU and NATO expressing concern over the killing of Ukrainian politician and condemning the situation in Ukraine."

The former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Azarov said to the leaders of the Western countries...

"Because of your support in Ukraine there are political murders, terror taking place against political opponents, and all the people. What else should these Nazis do, for you to finally understand and be aware of your responsibility for what is happening now in Ukraine?"

Comment: RFE/RL has some more details:

At the scene, kiosk operator Lyubov Pereyenko said she had just opened her shop when a deafening blast shook the ground. "The explosion was so powerful that it sent parts [of the car] flying into my kiosk," she told RFE/RL.

A barista at a mobile coffee truck said the blast thrust him backward and nearly knocked him to the ground and that it appeared Sheremet was alive when onlookers pulled his mangled body from the scorched vehicle. "He took a breath. Maybe just one," said the barista, who did not want to give his name. Sheremet's body was smoking, he added, so bystanders poured water over his body.
...
"Shocked by the murder of Pavel Sheremet," Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said on Twitter. He called Sheremet "one of the best" journalists and said: "Pavel was such a decent man. So sad."
...
Sevhil Musayeva-Borovyk, the chief editor at Ukrayinska Pravda, told RFE/RL that she believes Sheremet's killing was related to his work. Other colleagues at the website told RFE/RL that he recently had complained that he was being followed.
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A crusader for human rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, Sheremet was arrested while shooting a report about smuggling across the Belarus-Lithuanian border in 1997 and sentenced to two years in prison -- a move widely viewed as politically motivated.