Dissident Spotlight: Pavel Sheremet
Pavel Sheremet was a Ukrainian journalist who covered the corruption of Belarus' president. Sheremet was killed by a car bomb of suspected Belarusian origin.

Pavel Sheremet was born in Belarus, which is directly north of Ukraine. Belarus is also run by Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko has been Belarus’ dictator since 1994. He’s also become widely recognized as a Russian puppet since the early 2020s.
Sheremet’s opposition to Lukashenko goes back decades. In 1997, Sheremet was the spokesman for Charter Ninety-Seven, a pro-democracy movement in Belarus. Sheremet was sentenced to 36 months in prison for false charges of illegally crossing Belarus’ border. The sentence was suspended, but the journalist who was charged alongside Sheremet was disappeared in 2000.
Sheremet went on to become an investigative journalist. He would eventually move to Ukraine, where he was critical of Belarus’ and Russia’s corrupt leaders. Sheremet was also critical of Ukraine’s leaders, who were famously corrupt. (In his presidential campaign, Volodymyr Zelensky promised to address corruption in the Ukrainian government.)
On July 20, 2016, Sheremet was killed by a car bomb in Kiev, Ukraine. In most stories about murdered dissidents, the state security services are suspected and all but implicated.
But Sheremet’s story was darker. To this day, his assassins are unidentified.
Ambiguities and Investigations
Initially, little progress was made publicly. The first arrests in Sheremet’s murder weren’t made until 2019. Ukrainian police arrested five people who were suspected of involvement in Sheremet’s death.
By the time suspicion of the five had narrowed to three members of this group, many were doubting that the correct people were in custody. The three people remaining in custody were veterans of the War in Donbass. They fought against Russia when it invaded Crimea, and although their ties to nationalist groups in Ukraine were suspect, even Sheremet’s allies were skeptical.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that one of Sheremet’s closest friends and editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda that she was “not confident” the police had arrested the correct people. By then, details had begun to leak that revealed leads that hadn’t been chased by investigators. The case against the remaining three eventually evaporated.
Then in 2021, the Ukrainian police announced they had received audio recordings of the former head of Belarus’ KGB discussing ways to “take care of” Sheremet.
That revelation hasn’t led to a breakthrough or progress in the case. Instead, the trial of the remaining three suspects was suspended indefinitely after Russia’s invasion.
Autocrats Undermine the Rule of Law Abroad
Sheremet wasn’t disappeared like his former co-defendant, but his murder leaves an unsettling number of open questions.
Belarus’ dictator is likely responsible. However, the agents who likely carried out his orders remain unidentified and unaccountable. Ignoring the law in other countries is a classic authoritarian technique. Assassination attempts and military invasions are age-old moves of hostile states.
In the modern world with mass communication, advanced weaponry, and sophisticated poisons, dictators in any part of the world can target a dissident abroad and ignore any country’s laws.
Sheremet is a warning to anyone who thinks the world’s autocrats are only the problem of the dictator’s people. The world’s autocrats won’t care about your laws if you get under their skin.