The bomb was planted under the driver's seat

‘Meduza’ reports from the scene of Pavel Sheremet's murder

At 7:40 in the morning, on July 20, in downtown Kiev—not far from the embassies and several government offices, including the headquarters of Ukraine's State Security Service—a car belonging to Alena Pritula, the head of the news website Ukrainskaya Pravda, exploded. The journalist Pavel Sheremet was behind the wheel. He later died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. Meduza looks at the first hours that followed this deadly attack.

Eyewitnesses say Pavel Sheremet was still alive for some time after the explosion, which was loud enough that people several blocks away heard it. Video footage has appeared showing the moment of the blast and the first seconds afterwards: before paramedics arrive, people try to help the victim; three men pull Sheremet from the smoking car and lay him out on the road. The ambulance arrives, the paramedics take a quick look at the man, and they hurry him onto a stretcher. Pavel Sheremet then died on the way to the hospital.

An hour later, on the same street (one of the busiest in Kiev), there was a commotion. There were rows of different vehicles: fire trucks and police cars, and crowds of cameramen and gawkers. Some passersby were oblivious. Emergency workers sawed through the wreckage of Alena Pritula's car. After emergency responders left, the wreckage caught fire again, and this time it burned up completely.

Journalists watched in silence; on social media, their colleagues talked about nothing but the murder.

“Are they alive? Who was in there, anyway?” asked women passing by.

“Pavel Sheremet. Do you know him? Well, he was a journalist. They locked him up in Belarus,” some men answered.

By 10 a.m., a couple of hours after the explosion, the first flowers started appearing on the pavement near the police tape. After another hour, the car and all its exploded pieces were dragged to the side of the road.

Responding police officers told Meduza that the bomb had been planted under the driver's seat. Sheremet had managed only to drive a few hundred feet from his home. Later, experts clarified that the perpetrator never entered the car: the explosive device was attached to the vehicle's underside.

For the past five years, the Belarusian-Russian journalist Pavel Sheremet lived in Kiev, working as one of the chief editors of the news website Ukrainskaya Pravda and hosting a radio program on Vesti. This morning, he was headed to work, like normal, in order to record the morning broadcast. He was always driving Alena Pritula's car. Alena was his common-law wife. The first chief editor of Ukrainskaya Pravda was a journalist named Georgy Gongadze, who was killed in 2000. Three years later, officers from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry were convicted of killing him.

Ukrainian journalists have reacted emotionally to Sheremet's murder. “President Petro Poroshenko! If you wanted another Gongadze, well here you go. Now you'll have to live with this... Now journalists feel completely defenseless in a country led by you. Don't expect any support from us. You can promise to take personal control over whatever you want. You can promise to fix everything. It does not work,” Sergei Lyamets, a former Ukrainskaya Pravda journalist, wrote on Facebook. The post now has 200 reactions and almost 130 shares.

Taras Chernovol, the son of the Ukrainian nationalist politician Vyacheslav Chernovol (whose death in a car crash in 1999 many consider to be a murder orchestrated for political reasons), believes that Sheremet's murderers wanted to pressure either Ukrainskaya Pravda or Vesti, where Sheremet worked. “It's a vicious warning to those who own or manage one of these publications,” Chernovol told reporters today.

The speaker of Ukraine's National Police, Yaroslav Trakalo, told Meduza that investigators' leading theory is that Sheremet was targeted for his activities as a journalist. The press office for Kiev's district attorney has classified the attack as a “premeditated murder.”

On the afternoon of July 20, President Poroshenko held a meeting with Ukraine's security officials, ordering the government to provide a security detail to Ukrainskaya Pravda chief editor Alena Pritula, and announcing that American experts from the FBI's explosives department will join the investigation. At the meeting, Attorney General Yuri Lutsenko noted that officials are also reviewing the possibility that Sheremet was targeted as part of a larger campaign to “destabilize the situation in Ukraine's capital.”