Two days after staging his death with the help of Ukrainian authorities, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko is explaining how the plot unfolded and why he went along with it.
He was reported to have been fatally shot at his apartment in Kiev on Tuesday but reappeared at a news conference Wednesday. A month earlier, Ukrainian authorities had informed him that there was a hit out on him, he said, showing him documents and photographs that could only have come from Russian federal agencies. The journalist had fled Russia in 2017 after a writing an “unpatriotic” Facebook post that triggered harassment and threats.
At a news conference on Thursday, Babchenko described how he rehearsed falling and what it felt like to lie on the floor, soaked in pig’s blood, before an ambulance rushed him off. The ordeal started at 6 p.m., and by 10 p.m., he had arrived, cold and wet, at the morgue.
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