The reported murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko at the door of his Kiev apartment late Tuesday appeared to be another case of a Kremlin critic turning up dead.
A photo apparently showing the balding 41-year-old in a pool of blood was shared on Ukrainian websites and social media. Foreign governments registered their outrage. Russia and Ukraine traded blame.
But then he showed up alive and well in public.
The journalist, who most recently has been working for a Ukrainian television channel, stepped out at a press conference on Wednesday—ostensibly organized to discuss his killing—to gasps from reporters and said it had all been part of an elaborate ruse put on by Ukrainian authorities to catch the organizers of the alleged planned hit.
Mr. Babchenko’s appearance was the latest bizarre chapter in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which has fought a covert war in its neighbor’s east since 2014.
Ukraine has long accused Russia of lying about sending troops across the border and using slanted or false reporting to fuel fighting.
Western and Ukrainian officials have said Russia kills critics at home and abroad, including Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader who was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015, former intelligence agent Aleksandr Litvinenko, who succumbed to a radioactive isotope in London in 2006, and a former Russian lawmaker who was shot outside a luxury hotel in Kiev last year. The British government has said Russia was behind the attempted killing of a former Russian agent with a nerve agent in England this year.
Such attacks are supposed to act as a warning to Kremlin critics that they aren’t safe anywhere, Western officials and some analysts say. Russia denies involvement in the incidents, saying they are an attempt to discredit Moscow. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman hit back at Ukraine on Wednesday, calling the operation an attempt to score propaganda points.
Relations between Russia and the West have plummeted amid Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria, exchanges of sanctions and U.S. accusations that Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Some media-rights organizations criticized Ukrainian authorities for spreading false information, but officials defended their efforts as necessary to catch the chain of people who arranged the attempted hit, which they said led to Russia.
Mr. Babchenko was contrite after emerging at the press conference.
“First of all, I’d like to apologize for what you had to live through…because I know the sickening feeling when you have to bury colleagues,” Mr. Babchenko told reporters. He then apologized to his wife, who knew of the ruse, for the strain the episode put her through.
Mr. Babchenko said the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, had approached him a month ago with information about a threat against his life and that he had agreed to take part in an operation designed to catch the plotters.
Ukrainian security officials said Russian security services had been behind the plot to kill Mr. Babchenko, a critic of the Kremlin’s wars in Ukraine and Syria who fled Russia last year amid threats against him. Russia denied the accusation.
Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of the SBU, said he had evidence that Russian security services had recruited a Ukrainian citizen to organize the attempt on Mr. Babchenko’s life, and that the journalist was the first of as many as 30 planned targets. Mr. Hrytsak said the man offered $30,000 to an acquaintance who had fought for Ukrainian government forces in eastern Ukraine in return for the killing, and played a video he said showed the handover of half the cash. The alleged organizer of the plot was detained three hours before the press conference, Mr. Hrytsak said.
Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said authorities had faked Mr. Babchenko’s death to convince those who had organized it that it had happened and enable law-enforcement officials to uncover the alleged plot.
Late Tuesday, Mr. Herashchenko had written that Mr. Babchenko had been shot in the back by an assailant after returning home from buying bread and had died in an ambulance.
Photos alleging to show Mr. Babchenko in a pool of blood were shared on Ukrainian websites and social media, and police had released a sketch of the alleged gunman.
“There was no other way,” Mr. Herashchenko wrote on his Facebook page.
Before Mr. Babchenko’s appearance on Wednesday, Russian officials chalked up his apparent murder to Ukraine’s inability to protect journalists and claimed it was a provocation aimed to make Russia look bad.
After the Kiev press conference, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a post on her Facebook page that Mr. Babchenko’s being alive was “the best news,” while noting that the story of his killing had been aimed at having a “propaganda effect.”
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said security services would provide round-the-clock protection to Mr. Babchenko and his family.
In Moscow, an opposition group said late Wednesday that three people had been detained by riot police at a meeting to commemorate Mr. Babchenko that wasn’t canceled despite his re-emergence.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com
