Polish authorities arrested a 36-year-old man on June 18 on suspicion of assassinating a caricaturist and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on June 17 that it was too early to say if the killing of Robert Kuzovkov, a 44-year-old Russian artist who used the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, in the town of Biala Podlaska in eastern Poland on June 15 was a political assassination.
“Everything points to this being a political murder,” Tusk said. “But we must wait for evidence or more concrete indications. Because if that was the case, if it was ordered by Russia, then it is an extremely serious matter internationally. It would constitute state terrorism.”
At a news conference in Warsaw, Polish Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski said the arrested man had been carrying a passport from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
“Early this morning, police apprehended a suspect in the murder of a Russian man, a murder that shocked all of Poland,” Kierwinski said.
Kierwinski said the suspect had links to organized crime and had committed crimes in Poland dating back to 2022.
Kuzovkov was shot at close range near his home in the eastern city of Biala Podlaska, 20 miles from the Belarusian border.
He specialized in caricatures of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and several high-ranking Russian officials.
Russian Involvement ‘Likely Hypothesis’
“If, in recent years, murders have been carried out in various countries—for example, in Germany a few years ago—on the orders of Russian security services, then we must seriously consider the possibility that when someone who is an open critic of Putin and Kadyrov is killed in this manner, this is a likely hypothesis,” Siemoniak told reporters.But he said the investigators would collect all possible evidence and would not rule out other motives at this stage.
Russia has previously been accused of assassinating or trying to kill its opponents abroad, including Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen nationalist, who was gunned down in Berlin in 2019.
In a June 18 post on X, police in Lublin said, “This morning near Warsaw, officers from the special investigative group of the Provincial Police Headquarters in Lublin detained a man suspected of the murder of a 44-year-old Russian citizen in Biała Podlaska.”
Kierwinski said the arrest took place at a hotel in Piastow, near Warsaw, which housed foreigners.
In a statement, the prosecutors said Kuzovkov “expressed criticism of the current policies of the Russian authorities.”
On June 14, Kuzovkov posted a video on his YouTube channel showing him staging a one-man protest outside the Russian Embassy in Berlin on June 12, which is Russia Day, a public holiday. It then shows him putting the Russian flag in a trash can.
In the video, he is shown carrying a painting showing a petite Putin being cradled in the arms of Joseph Stalin, a communist dictator of the Soviet Union.
Poland—which is a member of NATO and the European Union—has become a magnet for political dissidents from Russia and Belarus in recent years, and also houses large numbers of people who have fled the war in neighboring Ukraine.
