MOSCOW: A Ukrainian journalist known for his pro-Russian views was gunned down on Thursday in broad daylight in Kiev, local police said, a day after a pro-Russian lawmaker was found dead.

Oles Buzyna, 45, who worked as editor-in-chief of a leading daily until March, was killed early on Thursday afternoon by two masked men shooting from a passing car, the Ukrainian interior ministry said in a statement.

Buzyna, who ran for a seat in parliament on the Russian Bloc ticket in 2012, was largely perceived as more of an activist than a journalist. He had a three-month stint as the editor-in-chief of Segodnya, a newspaper owned by Ukraine’s Russia-leaning richest man, before he resigned in March citing censorship pressures.

The killing is particularly ominous following another high-profile murder on Wednesday. Oleh Kalashnikov, a lawmaker from ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s party, was found dead on the landing of his home in Kiev with a gunshot wound.

Police would not immediately say whether he was murdered or killed himself.Speaking at his annual call-in show, Russian President Vladimir Putin described Buzyna’s death as a political murder and accused the Ukrainian government of reluctance to investigate the killings of political opponents.

Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister, said in a Facebook post that Buzyna — like Kalashnikov — was a key witness in a criminal case related to pro-Russian activists who in early 2014 attacked the pro-Western protests on Kiev’s main square.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2015

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