Ukraine Facing International Ire Over Faking Death Of Anti-Putin Journalist – OpEd

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On Tuesday, headlines were filled with reports out of Ukraine – which not a single journalist decided to fact-check – that a prominent anti-Putin journalist, Arkady Babachenko, had been murdered in his Kiev apartment – “shot three times in the back” after returning from the store to buy bread. Immediately, the echo chamber shouted “Putin’s fault.”

The next day, Babachenko showed up at a press conference, where Ukrainian authorities announced that his death had been an elaborate hoax in order to catch his actual assassins who they claim are now in custody.

The scheme has received massive international backlash – from horrified journalist colleagues who were kept in the dark and thought, to the Kremlin, to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) – which called the staging “intolerable” and “inadmissible.”

“Arkady Babchenko is still alive and can continue to do his job as a critical journalist: the news is excellent,” said Philippe Leruth, the president of the IFJ, in a statement.

“But in falsely spreading the news of his murder, the Ukrainian authorities have gravely harmed the credibility of information, and their brief communication risks being seen as a propaganda operation,”

Journalist Sophie Pinkham writes in The Guardian of the rollercoaster of emotions she and fellow journalists experienced over their friend, concerns they had for their own safety, and the damage this has done to Ukraine’s credibility.

No one had trouble believing this story; no one even considered questioning it. It was gruesomely familiar, similar to the many horrifying stories we’d already heard from Russia, Ukraine, and other countries where journalists are killed for their reporting.

Would they be killed, too? We agreed that it was unlikely that the Ukrainian government would find Babchenko’s killer. If anyone would discover the truth, it would be journalists. And by investigating the killing, they might very well be risking their own lives.

For me, for my visiting friend, and for many others, relief soon gave way to doubts about the ethics and the wisdom of this “special operation”. On Facebook, the Ukrainian MP Anton Herashchenko tried to explain why it had been necessary to disseminate an artist’s sketch of a supposed killer “with a Caucasian appearance”.

Ukraine has an increasingly serious problem of ultranationalist attacks on ethnic and other minorities, as well as journalists.)

In its endless one-upmanship against Russia, Ukraine has once again cut off its nose to spite its face, severely undermining its own credibility and that of journalists. This stunt also seems a gratuitous blow to what is left of public sincerity, compassion, and trust. Next time a journalist is killed in Ukraine (and, unfortunately, it seems certain that there will be a next time), even the least cynical observers, the kinds of people who wept all night over Babchenko’s supposed death, will likely wonder whether they should believe in a tragic death until they’ve inspected the corpse themselves. -The Guardian

According to Tuesday’s media “reports”, the journalist, Arkady Babachenko, was shot three times in the back in his apartment building in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev last Tuesday after going out to buy bread – his wife finding him in a pool of blood after she came out of the bathroom following the “murder.” He was pronounced dead in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

MINA

MINA is the Macedonian International News Agency

One thought on “Ukraine Facing International Ire Over Faking Death Of Anti-Putin Journalist – OpEd

  • June 1, 2018 at 7:06 am
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    Nothing news about the Ukrainian behavior; they kill Russian, Hebrew and Romanian people during WWII under disguise of SS Waffen uniform and not only, they killed Russian people now, they treat badly all their minorities except the tartar that are used as a pretext of bad treatment from the side of Russian.
    Now under the American CIA guidance they do what they have always done. Probable the historical continuous unrest and fight between all clans and populations living on this territory , prevent them to form a stable country and not to be conquered in turns by Poland, Lithuania, Austria and Russia. Building up a history based on hate against all population that actually live on the same territory is not the right way to achieve a good living standard for a country that was invented 100 years ago by Bolsheviks and moved his boundary at least two time in detriments of his neighbors. So, the “killing” of Arkady Babachenko is a rehearsal of murder attempt from England, nurtured by the same CIA Agency.

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