The Russians kill journalist Levin – RSF

Reporters Without Borders released a report with information and evidence showing that the photographer and his friend and bodyguard were killed by Russian soldiers in a forest near Kyiv.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) project experts believe that Ukrainian journalist and photographer Max Levin and his friend Oleksiy Chernyshev, a soldier, were deliberately killed by Russian soldiers near Kyiv, probably after interrogations and torture. This is stated in their report titled How Russian troops executed Ukrainian journalist Max Levin.

Following the visit of two investigators to Ukraine from May 24 to June 3 to investigate the death of Max Levin during the occupation, Reporters Without Borders released a report with information and evidence suggesting that the photographer and his friend and The bodyguard was killed by Russian soldiers in a forest near Kyiv, possibly, after interrogations and even torture.

The bodies of Levin and Chernyshev were found on April 1 in a forest near the village of Moshchun, 20 km north of Kyiv. Two men were killed on 13 March. The head of the RSF’s investigation department, Arnaud Froger, and French military photojournalist Patrick Chauvel, who worked with Levin in the Donbas at the end of February, collected evidence and clues about the circumstances of the deaths. by Levin in Ukraine for more than a week.

They decided that Levin and Chernyshev had been killed in cold blood. The evidence against Russian troops is compelling. Based on the information and evidence they gathered, RSF investigators were able to reconstruct the events of that gruesome day.

On March 10, Levin’s drone went missing in the woods near Moshchun while trying to take footage of the Russian military invasion of the area. When he returned to these forests three days later, the Russians had already occupied part of the forest. The terrain is hostile, but Levin wants to return his drone because he is convinced that the last photos he took were important. He did not succeed.

RSF representatives arrived in Ukraine on May 24, almost two months after the de-occupation. However, the terrain was still dangerous: the Russians left traps and explosive devices. The smell of burning was still felt in the village, the ground was strewn with shattered armored vehicles, half of the houses were destroyed, and several residents were injured.

Accompanied by members of the Ukrainian security forces, the RSF found the crime scene. Levin’s burning car was still there. At the scene, RSF specialists also found some ammunition and Chernyshev’s identification papers.

Some objects with possible DNA traces suggesting the presence of Russian soldiers very close to the scene of the murders of Levin and Chernyshev were also identified by the RSF and some were seized.

In the final phase of the search, metal detectors found a bullet that likely hit Levin.

Reporters Without Borders could not answer all the questions they were interested in, but made two hypotheses of how the events were formed. The organization hopes that one day the evidence will lead to the identification of the perpetrators of this double murder.

RSF general secretary Christophe Deloir noted that “an examination of crime scene photos taken at the scene of observation and material evidence seized clearly identifies a murder that may have been preceded by interrogation or even torture.”

He added that Max Levin and his friend paid with their lives for fighting for reliable information, so RSF will fight to identify and find those who killed them.

It should be recalled that earlier it was reported that the general director of Blitz-Inform publishing house, the chief editor of Business magazine, the author of the Business 100 project, the journalist Vladimir Chepovoy, died in a battle with the occupiers .

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