CARICATURE KILLING

Artist Who Humiliated Putin Shot Dead in Execution-Style Murder

The satirist had skewered the Russian elite for years.

A Russian artist who mocked Vladimir Putin in savage caricatures was shot dead execution-style in eastern Poland on Monday. Robert Kuzovkov, 44, who worked under the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, was hit by five bullets—one of them to his head—in a Biała Podlaska parking lot, roughly 600 meters from Belarus’s consulate. Police have since held two Belarusian men, 33 and 37, near that same building. A gunman opened fire twice before, in the words of prosecution spokesman Marcin Kozak, “the perpetrator approached, fired three more shots and then quickly fled the scene.” Kuzovkov had left Russia in 2021, fearing he would be persecuted because his drawings savaged Putin, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alike. Two days before the murder, he shared one of his works portraying Kadyrov and his son Adam as pigs. Three days earlier, Skrepetsky had protested in Berlin on Russia Day, wielding a caricature pairing Putin with Joseph Stalin.