A Death Sentence for an Opinion

In most countries of the world, a press reporter can be a nuisance - an annoyance - and can be banned from political events and not invited to dinner with anyone in a target administration.  In the US, the Trump campaign banned a few from their events, and the other candidates did too without making much of it.  They rarely end up dead for their way of reporting a story.  The possible exceptions are few, but Russia is one of them.  In early September, a bomb cremated a reporter in downtown Kiev.  His main offense was being critical of Russia's handling of events in the Ukraine, something hardly worthy of a death sentence for Pavel Sheremet.

Russia's news service RT has a different slant on most of the others reporting the story:  "Sheremet was a well-known Russian journalist and political analyst specializing in relations between Russia and Ukraine, as well as developments in former Soviet republics. Over the last five years, Sheremet lived and worked in Ukraine, employed by the UP.

The media company was founded in 2000 by Pritula and Georgy Gongadze, a Ukrainian journalist of Georgian origin who was assassinated on September 17, 2000.

The Ukrainian system has become a 'mass grave' for journalists, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Wednesday."

Most of the Western press says Sheremet was a critic of the Kremlin.  That statement alone seems to characterize the reason for his death, although he was driving his boss' car and not his own.  Perhaps he did that often, but there is no mention of it one way or another.  On the Russian side, characterizing the Ukraine as a "mass grave" has a ring to it but it not very accurate.  The arrests and killing of journalists were mostly done by the "friends of Russia" Living in the eastern part of the country where Russian-speaking natives do most of the killing.

The Russians clearly lack the patience of the Chinese or the subtlety of other advanced countries.  There is not reason a person has to die for what he writes in a blog or in a news story.