We grieve his loss, and send our condolences to his family and to our colleagues at Ukrainska Pravda, where Sheremet worked.
We grieve, but we’re also angry.
We think that this murder is the latest grim chapter in a story that started nearly 16 years ago, when another Ukrainian journalist, Georgiy Gongadze was kidnapped and killed.
We are convinced that if the Gongadze murder had been properly investigated, and the ones who ordered it had been found and punished, Sheremet would have made it to his radio show.
But that never happened. The Ukrainian leadership – be it led by a wannabe-dictator like Viktor Yanukovych or self-declared democrats like Petro Poroshenko or Viktor Yushchenko – has failed every single test of its commitment to protect freedom of speech.
Between Gongadze and Sheremet, there were many others. More than 50 journalists have been killed or died suspiciously in Ukraine since the 1991 independence. Many others have been attacked, beaten up or threatened, simply for doing their work. No high-profile cases of such attacks on journalists have ended in convictions of the perpetrators.
Moreover, Ukrainian journalists who are critical of the government in recent years have been subjected to massive attacks by trolls on social media.
We must remember, too, that certain people in power endorsed the Myrotvorets website when it published the names of the journalists who got permission to enter the separatist-occupied territories in the eastern Ukraine, labelling them “collaborators.”
This ongoing harassment of journalists and failure to protect the freedom of speech has effectively hung a target on every journalist in this country.
We want to hope for a fair and effective investigation of this murder, but after so many failures, it’s hard to believe there will be one.
