‘Murdered’ Russian Journalist shows up at News Conference

The Russian journalist who was reported to have been shot dead in Kiev, Arkady Babchenko, has turned up alive at a news conference in Ukraine.

A Kremlin critic who’d been feared killed in the Ukrainian capital, Babchenko surprisingly turned up at a police press conference on Wednesday afternoon in front of journalists who had been expecting updates on the investigation into his murder.

It is understood that the journalist staged his death in coordination with Ukrainian police as part of an investigation into threats made against his life.

Sources say the plan had been in place for more than a month after Ukrainian authorities obtained intelligence that his execution had been ordered by Moscow.

Babchenko, a veteran war correspondent, fled Russia in 2017 after receiving threats over a post he made on social media detailing Russian involvement in the crisis in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Russia has been a dangerous ground for journalists as a good number of them and other dissidents have been killed in recent years in murders that remain unsolved.