Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Thursday that a suspect has been detained in connection with the fatal shooting of a Russian citizen and subversive artist earlier this week.
The killing of an artist critical of Russian, Soviet and Chechen leaders comes amid heightened tensions over President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It is one of a number of assassinations in recent years targeting prominent opposition or dissident figures in NATO countries, from Poland to Lithuania to Britain or Berlin.
What did Tusk say on Thursday’s arrest?
Tusk said the arrests were coordinated by police and Poland’s internal security agency (ABW).
He said the suspect was using a Georgian passport, and the investigation was trying to find out where the orders for the killing might have come from.
“The suspect involved in the murder of a Russian in Biała Podlaska was detained by the Lublin police and ABW! He is using a Georgian passport. The services are working to identify the mastermind,” he wrote online.
Tusk also said that the killing appeared to be a “political assassination”.
He said, “If it was started by Russia, then it is a very serious matter with international dimension also.”
Police in Lublin said the seized passport belonged to a 36-year-old man.
Thursday’s arrest comes after two other Belarusian suspects were also detained but not charged.
What do we know about crime?
The victim, identified as Robert Kuzovkov and perhaps better known by his artistic pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, was killed Tuesday in Biała Podlaska — a town east of Warsaw, near the border with Ukraine, prosecutors have said.
He was shot five times, once in the head. The attacker shot him, knocking him down, then came forward to fire twice more at close range.
Earlier on Thursday, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladislav Bartoszewski told Radio Zet that the Chechens were also “potentially suspected”, given the artist’s previous criticism of their leaders.
Who was Semyon Skrepetsky?
Skrepetsky was a visual artist who made his name with provocative caricatures of Putin as well as Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
But he also directed his satire at the Russian opposition, including a satire of Alexei Navalny.
Born in a village in Russia’s Altai Republic, Skrepetsky had been living in exile in Poland since 2021. The government of Poland has said that it had offered him a protective detail in the past but he refused.
Three days before he was killed, the artist traveled to Berlin on Russia Day.
In Berlin, they protested outside the Russian embassy carrying icon-like caricatures of both Stalin and Putin.
A series of prominent Russian politicians, dissidents, activists and former spies have been assassinated in NATO countries during the Putin era – including, but not limited to, the assassination of a Chechen rebel in central Berlin in 2019 and the poisoning of former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England in 2018.
The Kremlin has denied any involvement in such incidents.
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Edited by: Zack Crellin