It felt like daytime under the lights outside Arkady Babchenko’s apartment block. It was a late May evening in 2018, and television crews were trying to force their way into the apartment block on Kyiv’s left bank, but the police had closed off the entrance. Medics carried out the body of the famous Russian journalist on a stretcher.
An unknown man had shot Babchenko, a war correspondent, as he entered his own apartment. Shortly after, the Ukrainian police reported that Babchenko had died en route to the hospital.
“They took me to the morgue, where they brought me into an orderly’s room,” Babchenko told the BBC a few days later. “There I came back to life, I took off my t-shirt and cleaned myself up. I turned on the TV and started watching the news about my ‘murder’.”
