Ukrainians pay respects to journalist killed in car bombing

Fellow journalists say death of Pavel Sheremet in Kiev this week was a ‘monstrous blow’

An image of Pavel Sheremet is displayed behind his coffin in Kiev. Photograph: Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Friday 22 July 2016

Hundreds of Ukrainians have paid their respects to a prominent journalist who died in a car bombing in Kiev this week, queueing to lay flowers at an open casket.

The killing of Pavel Sheremet, 44, killing on Wednesday sent shockwaves through the Ukrainian media community. He will be buried in his home town of Minsk,Belarus.

Authorities have pledged to conduct a thorough and swift investigation into the killing but would not be drawn on possible motives. Sheremet had irked officials in Belarus and Russia before he moved to Ukraine, where he said there were fewer hurdles to independent reporting.

Though ties between Ukraine and Russia have been all but severed because of the ongoing separatist war in eastern Ukraine, Russian journalists who worked with Sheremet came to pay their respects.

“Those who did it, no good will come to them in this life or the next one,” said Yevgeny Buntman, deputy editor-in-chief of the Moscow Echo, who had come to pay his respects.

“This was a monstrous blow, but we must keep the memory alive, to always have Pasha’s face in front of us and his hand in our hands so that we are not overcome by fear and [do] not betray ourselves.”

Sheremet started out as a television journalist in Belarus in the 1990s and was briefly detained for illegally crossing the border while reporting on how porous it was. He left for Russia and was stripped of his Belarusian citizenship in 2010.

Pavel Sheremet, killed by a car bomb in Kiev on Wednesday. Photograph: Dmytro Larin/AFP/Getty Images

In a media landscape sanitised by the authoritarian Belarusian government, Sheremet founded belaruspartisan.org, which went on to become one of the country’s leading independent news websites.

He moved to Ukraine in 2014 after what he said was pressure from his Russian television bosses over the reporting of ongoing opposition protests in Kiev.

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, has urged police and prosecutors to find the killers and bring them to justice.

On Friday the prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, held a moment of silence in honour of Sheremet at the start of a government meeting.

“I know for sure that law enforcement agencies don’t sleep at night in order to solve this monstrous murder and feel they have to do it as soon as possible,” he said in comments carried by the Interfax news agency.