On the evening of May 29, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was killed with three shots in the back in Kyiv. He participated in two Chechen wars (in the first - by conscription, in the second - by contract), worked as a military journalist - that is, a journalist at the scene of hostilities, including in Georgia, wrote honest books and essays about the war, in February 2017 emigrated from Russia due to threats he received, and since August 2017 he has lived and worked in Ukraine. Arkady Babchenko was 41 years old. There are six adopted children left in his family.
In the Chechen wars Arkady Babchenko served in the signal troops, motorized rifle troops, and as a crew commander in a grenade launcher platoon. Was injured. His nickname is in many in social networks"Reserve foreman."
Journalist Babchenko never retired. He was excluded on May 29, 2018 from the lists of his military unit due to death at the front, which passed through his mind and heart.
Arkady Babchenko hated war as an absolute evil, but became himself in the war. The war, like a sculptor, sculpted his human essence; he was constantly on a special wave of connection with everyone who fought and is fighting. Like few other writers today, he understood the psychology of war: both the psychology of the politicians who instigated the war, and, down to the smallest detail, the psychology of the participants in the hostilities. These fighting They walked constantly, non-stop, and Arkady Babchenko lived like a man at the front, where every minute you could be shot in the face or in the back.
Arkady Babchenko was a recklessly brave man. Pavel Gutiontov said about Yuri Shchekochikhina after his murder: "He was extremely indiscriminate in his choice of enemies." This fully applies to Babchenko.
He was a radical and public opponent, or rather, an enemy of the current government in Russia, including Vladimir Putin, called the Russian-Ukrainian war a crime without a statute of limitations and was confident in the inevitable criminal punishment of its organizers. He wanted this trial, this punishment and hoped to live to see it.
He was psychologically incompatible with the political regime waging war, and this incompatibility was one of the reasons for his departure from Russia.
We met on November 28, 2014 in Moscow at the conference “The War in Chechnya: Political Mistakes and War Crimes,” which was organized by the Yabloko party.
Arkady Babchenko spoke very briefly and said that he was ready to answer questions. What was there to tell after the books he wrote - “Alkhan-Yurt” had already been published by that time (2006), and “War” was coming out (2015).
Leading Dmitry Florin asked Babchenko to comment on his own idea that only at the very beginning of the war in Chechnya could it be stopped: there were not many killed yet, there was not a lot of blood, and then it was impossible - madness began and the personal motivation of the war participants to kill appeared of people.
From the outside it may seem that living like this was very difficult. No, it was easy to live like that. In the world of Arkady Babchenko, good and evil were not masked by shades of gray.
He was a professional soldier real war. And he became a voluntary soldier of the world in a war against war. The words spoken in this war are very dangerous. In response to these words, bullets fly.
The murder of Arkady Babchenko is political murder. He was killed on political war between good and evil. Shots in the back are the signature style of evil. This handwriting cannot be confused with anything else.
Arkady Babchenko died in a war that he did not start, but tried to stop. He tried to do this stronger than many others, so he was killed.
We couldn't stop this war.
According to media reports, on the evening of May 29, opposition Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was killed with three shots in the back on the stairs of the house where he permanently lived with his family in Kyiv. IN last years Babchenko lived in exile, was an active opponent of the current Russian government and published socio-political articles with sharp criticism of both the government and the situation in Russia as a whole. It later turned out that Babchenko’s death was staged. Medialeaks has collected the most important things about his career and personal life.
Biography
Arkady Babchenko was born on March 18, 1977 in Moscow. Two years after graduating from school, he was expelled from the university and drafted into the army. He served in the North Caucasus from 1995 to 1997, and participated in the First Chechen War. In his autobiography published on the Snob website, he describes it this way:
Served in the Signal Corps. What they said - he did, where they ordered - he walked, what they hung - he carried, what they put on - he rode, what they showed - he shot. Although there was no sense in this. There were no injuries or awards.
In 1999, after the explosions of residential buildings in Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, he went to serve under a contract and participated in the Second Chechen War: he was a signalman, served in motorized rifle troops, and in the end - commander of a grenade launcher crew.
In his autobiography, Babchenko described his experience of contract service with irony:
He served as a signalman, then gave up and went into the infantry, from where he was sold for two cans of stew to a grenade launcher platoon for the position of commander of an AGS-17 crew. He didn’t shoot at people unnecessarily, didn’t show reasonable initiative, didn’t evade orders, tried to be closer to the kitchen and away from his superiors, had his own opinion, and sometimes thought.
By education, Babchenko was a lawyer: he graduated from the Modern Humanitarian Academy and became a bachelor international law. Since 2000, having retired from the army, he has been engaged in journalism and began publishing notes in LiveJournal under the pseudonym Sergeant Major of the Reserve. He began his professional career as a war correspondent for Moskovsky Komsomolets, and visited the so-called hot spots: the North Caucasus, South Ossetia, south-eastern Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan (during the unrest in Osh), Turkey, Egypt and others.
Arkady Babchenko was married. Together with his wife and mother, the family raised six adopted children and one natural daughter (she became the third child in the family). As the “Metodicka” telegram channel writes, three of the adopted children are each other’s siblings. Formally, Babchenko’s mother is the children’s guardian.
The children were very difficult. They stole, did not know how to eat solid food, did not know how to wash their own clothes, were seriously retarded in development, were afraid to go outside, hid things and ate fruits and vegetables with peels. Some had pancreatitis, some were afraid to go out into the light, and one girl had no chewing reflex. Luda didn’t speak until she was seven years old, Sveta didn’t know what grapes were.
Journalist career
In his own words, Arkady Babchenko did not stay anywhere for long: “they didn’t take him to decent places, he left the indecent ones himself.” After working at Moskovsky Komsomolets, he switched to television, where he changed several channels and television programs: Forgotten Regiment, Peasant Russia, Army Store and other programs of the Zvezda channel, Postscript with Alexei Pushkov on TVC. He himself called television “garbage dump.” After leaving TVC, he worked as a taxi driver for several years.
As a journalist, Arkady Babchenko became widely known while working as a war correspondent. Novaya Gazeta" In this capacity, he went on business trips to South Ossetia in 2008, to Osh in Kyrgyzstan during the unrest. Babchenko also reported from Istanbul during the unrest in Turkey and from Egypt during the Arab Spring.
Here is a short episode from a South Ossetian business trip, described by Babchenko in Facebook.
August 2008, Georgia, Zemo-Nikozi. MTLB battalion "Vostok". The day after the battle, in which our column was cut in two, a tank, an infantry fighting vehicle, two Urals were burned, and nine people were killed and thirteen were wounded.
The night passed on the bank of the canal in anticipation of a retaliatory tank attack by the Georgian army and a second assault on the village scheduled for the morning. Until the morning there were small white dots in the sky. and" and bombed Gori, located about twenty kilometers away.
It was the first time in my life that I saw a night bombing. The spectacle was mesmerizing. There was something so... unearthly about it. Inhuman. The applied forces and the released energy were too great. It can only be compared with a tsunami. Or an asteroid crash. Or simply - the gigantic space of Space. My brain refused to believe that all this was being done by human hands.
There was no retaliatory attack, but that night of waiting exhausted everyone.
Arkady Babchenko
Tall plane trees hid Zemo-Nikozi completely, with the exception of two white cowsheds on the outskirts closest to us, from which we worked yesterday anti-tank systems, and I tried to see, remember their outlines, leave in my memory some milestones for this village, which I never saw. The sun had already risen quite high above the mountains, the heat turned on instantly, without warning, as if someone had turned a switch, and thirst again began to drill into the brain with a dull, slow drill. Orkhan Dzhemal passed. He raised the camera, took aim, and clicked. I raised my hands. Not for greeting, not for jokes - not for anything. Just. He stepped back a little, chose a better angle and clicked again. This photo is from the cover of his book “War. Chronicles of Five Days." I never thought that someday my sting would be used to illustrate books about war.
In his own words, Arkady Babchenko was fired from Novaya Gazeta “for sloppiness.” In his autobiography, he writes about his work as a full-time journalist:
In Kyrgyzstan I saved people. In Krymsk I dug up houses. In Blagoveshchensk I delivered humanitarian aid. In Istanbul on Taksim he was detained, beaten a little and deported as a foreign spy. In Moscow on Manezhnaya it’s the same. However, instead of deportation, he became involved in a couple of criminal cases. But all with the same wording - like a foreign spy ruining our great homeland.
In March 2012, after mass protests related to the parliamentary and presidential elections in Russia, a criminal case was opened against Arkady Babchenko under Art. 212 “Calls for riots.” The reason was a post about what tactics protesters should follow.
From 2006 to 2010, Babchenko published the magazine “The Art of War,” which published memories of veterans of modern wars that took place in the territory former USSR. In 2014, without a permanent job, he began publishing notes on Facebook, offering to transfer donations to him, calling it the “Journalism without Intermediaries” project.
Arkady Babchenko wrote two books. The collection of stories "Alkhan-Yurt", memories of the war in Chechnya, was published in 2006. The documentary novel “War” was published in 2015.
In December 2016, Arkady Babchenko's Facebook post about the Tu-154 crash, in which, caused a scandal. He said he felt nothing but indifference towards the victims of the tragedy. Deputy Vitaly Milonov proposed, and Senator Franz Klintsevich called for a criminal case to be opened against Babchenko.
In February 2017, Arkady Babchenko left Russia. According to him, this was due to threats. First he lived in Prague, then in Israel, and since August 2017 - in Ukraine, where until recently he hosted the “Prime: Babchenko” program on the Crimean Tatar TV channel ATR.
Since 2014, Arkady Babchenko has been in opposition to the current Russian government. Colleagues noted that his view of Russian politics became radical. Here's what he writes about it in Facebook Novaya Gazeta special correspondent Pavel Kanygin:
Every day Arkasha hacked from the shoulder so dashingly that Sometimes even those close to me felt uneasy. What can we say about the rest. His words were offensive to the authorities, who again declared their sacred nature, and offensive to the fanatics who suddenly became the Russian political mainstream.
Many of Babchenko’s posts on Facebook caused a massive negative reaction, and some phrases became memes, for example: “Your homeland will abandon you, son. Always".
In May 2017, answering questions from users of the website TheQuestion, Arkady Babchenko spoke about death as follows:
Dying is always scary. And twenty years ago, and now, and, I suspect, even in a hundred. Just scary in different ways. At eighteen I was scared because I had just crawled out from under my mother’s skirt. You haven't seen the world yet. You haven't lived yet. At all. You haven't had anything yet. You haven't even had love yet. Eighteen years old is practically still a child. The world is open before you, so alluring, it calls you with all its colors, and you have to die. […] Now the fear is different. Not as spicy. Somehow I’ve settled down, or something... […] But it’s scary that you won’t see your child grow up. You'll never be able to hug again. And your daughter will never be able to hug you. Now that's a shame. But there's nothing you can do about it. Costs of the profession. We need to be aware of this. You have to understand that this is your job - if necessary, die with these people. Dying, of course, is scary. Always. If someone says otherwise, don't believe it. And, as for me, the further it goes, the worse it gets. Because he can’t always be lucky. Luck is limited. Well, I'm lucky. Well two. Well five. But someday it must still arrive...
Versions
Shortly after the news of the murder of Arkady Babchenko, the Twitter account of the National Police of Ukraine published a sketch of the suspect.
Illustration copyright Reuters Image caption Arkady Babchenko (center) is known as a radical critic of the Kremlin
In SeptemberaccountRussianoppositionjournalist Arkady Babchenko's Twitter account was hacked. On behalf of the journalist, hackers published a message about his alleged impending arrest, as well as a letter of repentance. BBCtried to find outwho could have done this? Footprintsbroughtin the DPR.
In May 2018, the world media circulated footage from a press conference in Kyiv. Three of them are depicted. In camouflage - the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Vasily Gritsak. In a blue business suit - Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko.
Standing between them in a black sweatshirt with the inscription “Journey” was Russian opposition journalist and publicist Arkady Babchenko. Kyiv is already his third stop in emigration after the Czech Republic and Israel.
It was explained to journalists that three night shots from a Makarov pistol and a photo of a bloodied Babchenko on the threshold of his apartment were staged, and the man who tried to order the murder of the journalist was detained and accused of having connections with the Russian special services. This is Ukrainian businessman Boris German.
At the trial, German testified against another businessman, Vyacheslav Pivovarnik, who is allegedly hiding in Russia.
This was preceded by two strange events.
On September 12, it appeared on the Internet video message from the brewer: following German, he called himself a former freelance agent of the SBU, and also accused the Ukrainian special service of an explosion in his parents’ house in the Transcarpathian town of Chop.
And on September 11, hackers broke into the electronic Mailbox Babchenko on Mail.Ru and social media accounts associated with this address.
A message appeared on Babchenko’s Twitter: “Today they want to illegally detain me on fictitious charges of espionage. I ask all concerned people to urgently come to my house...”
On Babchenko’s LiveJournal page, a “repentance” was published on his behalf: he allegedly admitted that, on instructions from the SBU, he led “a special group of bloggers involved in planting various counterfeits.”
How Babchenko's accounts were hacked
The journalist told the BBC Russian Service that the hackers managed to pick up complex password approximately 12 characters. His accounts on Skype and LiveJournal displayed the network addresses of the attackers, rented in Poland and Slovakia.
On the same day that Babchenko’s Twitter, LiveJournal and other accounts were hacked, a message appeared on one of the pages on the VKontakte social network. video report about the hack on behalf of the CyberBerkut hackers.
Immediately after this, the hackers' report republished in the “Reports from the Novorossiya Militia” group on VKontakte - this group is known for the fact that it was in it that on July 17, 2014, a message appeared about “another birdfall,” when the Malaysian Boeing MH17 was shot down over the Donbass. The anonymous author believed that a Ukrainian An-26 military transport aircraft was shot down.
To enter Babchenko’s account, the hackers linked their phone number to him, it follows from the report. In the video, the number is retouched, but for less than a second this patch disappears (the defect could have appeared when importing the file).
The first is Pavel Belousov, a consultant at the DSS380 School of Digital Security in Kyiv.
+380713001743
By stopping the video at the right place, you can see the hacker’s phone number: +380713001743. This number is from the network of the mobile operator "Phoenix", which operates in the territory controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk people's republic(DPR).
Two sources familiar with the situation in the DPR told the BBC that numbers with the combination “071300” are often found among representatives of the DPR security services: the “ministries” of defense, security, internal affairs, emergency situations, as well as the personal security of the head of this entity.
Image caption Still frame from the video about hacking Babchenko’s email: the hacker didn’t manage to enter the phone number the first time
The BBC found confirmation of this: the telephone number of the press secretary of the DPR “Ministry of Defense” Daniil Bezsonov differs from the hacker’s number by only one of the last digits. And this is most likely not accidental.
- 34-year-old native of Kyiv Daniil Bezsonov is also known under the name Daniil Galitsky and the call sign “Goodwin”. Bezsonov took part in clashes with Ukrainian army and posted his photos on social networks with the prisoners in the background. Before the war, he was a police officer, then a lawyer. Before his passport was changed, his name was Ruslan Baklan. In 2013, former clients accused Baklan of fraud, and the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of the Kyiv Region Bar Association stripped him of his status.
Bezsonov refused to answer our questions, citing the BBC’s lack of media accreditation in the DPR.
Forgot to delete the file
The phone number is not the only clue left behind by the hackers.
In the video report, the hackers showed how they allegedly found a file called project in Babchenko’s cloud storage with “correspondence between a journalist and an SBU officer,” in which he allegedly demanded $20,000 from the intelligence service for staging a murder.
The hackers claimed that Babchenko copied it from the messenger to the Mail.Ru cloud storage.
Image caption The state-run Rossiya 24 devoted almost seven minutes to discussing the fake
After the hack, Babchenko contacted Mail.Ru, which helped restore access to the accounts. In the cloud storage basket there was the same project file. The hacker deleted it after recording the video report, but apparently forgot or did not have time to empty the trash.
In the file properties, the BBC found the author's pseudonym - Fess Hally. There is only one person using it on the Internet, and he has been using it for 15 years. This is 34-year-old Pavel Korenev from the “Ministry of Defense” of the DPR.
In 2005, Korenev used this nickname on a forensics forum, where he asked for a copy of a medical examination form for filming a television show. He then worked at VGTRK.
- Korenev (real name Elizarov) was fond of airsoft, traveled a lot throughout the CIS countries, and met the beginning of the conflict in eastern Ukraine in Donetsk. In the photo on social networks, Korenev poses either with a machine gun or with a video camera. A couple of years ago, Korenev revised his photos on VKontakte, placing a Censored sticker everywhere where his face was visible.
Bezsonov Group
- 23-year-old Dan Levy (real name Daniil Bogdan) recently moved to Moscow. He calls himself a former employee of the press service of the “DPR Ministry of Defense.” Levi is the author of most of the group's joint photos.
- BBC about the 30-year-old creator of the “Center for Strategic Initiatives of Novorossiya” Daliant Maximus. His real name is Ivan Borozenny. Like Bezsonov, Maximus previously worked as an investigator and lived for some time in the Dnieper. Maximus’s favorite genre is video messages to Ukrainian security forces.
Illustration copyright DAN LEVY Image caption With the help of fake news feeds and videos, these people are trying to discredit the Ukrainian authorities and Ukrainian military personnel.
As the BBC has already written, they are filming staged videos, attracting extras from among the Donetsk security forces.
Man in a helmet
Here is an incomplete list of projects of Bezsonov’s group since 2014:
- Publication of videos on behalf of "CyberBerkut", the hero of which depicts a knight with a sword and a hip holster. He is wearing a knight's helmet and a black uniform. According to the BBC, Daliant Maximus purchased the same rare medieval-style helmet in 2014.
- Daliant Maximus also posed in another video, where he called on the Ukrainian military to surrender - without a helmet, but in the same uniform and with the same holster.
- "Russian Liberation Movement" (ROD). A fake terrorist organization allegedly composed of “Russian neo-pagans” and “Banderaites” claimed responsibility for the arson of a residential area in Rostov-on-Don in August 2017 and the explosion at the Perekrestok store in St. Petersburg in December of the same year. According to the investigation, negligence led to the fire in Rostov; in St. Petersburg, a person with a mental disorder was detained for the explosion.
- “Pro-Russian partisans” allegedly operating in several cities of Ukraine. In the video messages of the “partisans” you can see the same people as in the ROD video. Bezsonov himself could appear in one of the videos of the “Dnepropetrovsk partisans”.
The hacker from the video report about Babchenko’s hack wears the same knight’s helmet as in the videos on behalf of Cyberberkut.
Previously, Daliant Maximus did not answer questions from the BBC about the staged videos, and after publication he wrote: “ROD is an outright provocation, not confirmed by facts, which cannot be pulled off the ears!”
After the hack, Babchenko was unable to contact Daliant Maximus.
Cinema about ISIS
In 2016, the BBC wrote about a series of photos and videos that allegedly showed militants of the Islamic State group (IS, banned in Russia) in the ranks of the Ukrainian Azov battalion. Cyberberkut claimed that these were materials from the smartphone of a person who fought on the side of Ukraine.
The fake was picked up by the Russian federal channels Zvezda and TV Center.
After studying Korenev’s photo, the BBC found that he had the same glasses and pants as the fake ISIS militants. The pants have a cartoon camouflage pattern. Multicam clothing items are similar to each other, but two pairs of pants with the same patterns in the same places is quite rare.
The role of the terrorist could have been played not by Korenev, but by another person, but in his things.
The scene for the video was chosen to be a former workshop in Donetsk: before the war, it housed the Izolyatsiya Museum of Contemporary Art, and after it began, it housed a camp of the DPR “Ministry of State Security.”
As one of the former prisoners from this camp, Dmitry Potekhin, told the BBC, stolen cars were kept in the workshop, among other things.
Shortly after the video appeared, in February 2016, Dan Levy posted a photo from this hangar on his VKontakte account. On it is a quadcopter that Levi controlled for filming commercial"Ministry of State Security" of the DPR. Levi posted a photo from the workshop shortly after the video with ISIS “militants” appeared.
Levy told the BBC he believed the photo showed different workshops, but declined to elaborate.
Petersburg trace
In 2016, investigators from Bellingcat exposed fake videos in which six men with machine guns on behalf of Azov threatened residents of the Netherlands with terrorist attacks if they did not support the association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union in a referendum.
Bellingcat believed that the St. Petersburg “troll factory” was behind these videos. The US authorities associate her with Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman whom the media called “Putin’s chef.”
