(oDR) At a press conference in early June, president Petro Poroshenko sought to reassure the Ukrainian and foreign media: “I give you my personal guarantee: there are no threats to journalists working in Ukraine.”
This statement followed the disclosure of private information about thousands of journalists accused of collaborating with “terrorists” in eastern Ukraine on a website controlled by Anton Herashchenko, a Ukrainian MP and advisor to Ukraine’s interior minister. Journalist Pavel Sheremet, who attended that press conference, later quipped that the press managed to throw a few buckets of ice into the warm bath prepared for the president. Six weeks later, Sheremet wasassassinated in downtown Kyiv, just steps away from several European embassies.
The manner of his murder — a car bomb during the morning rush hour on a busy intersection of the Ukrainian capital — indicates a brazenness never seen before in the crimes against Ukrainian journalists. The notorious murder 16 years ago of Georgiy Gongadze, the founder of the news website that Sheremet later worked for, happened under the cover of night in a wood on the outskirts of Kyiv. […]
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