by Olha Hembik | 2026-07-22

Poland offered Robert Kuzovkov protection. He turned it down and went back to his paints.

Three days before he died, the 44-year-old Russian caricaturist stood outside the Russian Embassy in central Berlin in bark sandals, a fur hat and a ribbon of St. George. He held up a painting he had made: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin cradling Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Russian flag jutted from a hole in the seat of his trousers and dragged behind him. When guests arriving for a Russia Day reception stopped to look, he pulled the flag out and dropped it, with a flourish, into a garbage can.

On the morning of June 15, walking his dog near his home in eastern Poland, he was shot five times.

Kuzovkov, who worked under the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, had fled Russia's Altai Region in 2021 with his family and won political asylum in Poland. He first lived in a refugee camp, then settled in Biała Podlaska, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Belarusian border -- a landing place for Russians and Belarusians fleeing over their politics.

An hour before he was killed, he posted on his Telegram channel, Semyon Skrepetsky's Picture Gallery, that "Russian patriots loved the trick with the flag." He attached screenshots of the threats, including death threats, the Berlin stunt had brought him.

'We are all at risk'

At about 10 a.m., a man approached Skrepetsky on Queen Jadwiga Street and fired. Prosecutors say the gunman shot him, waited until he fell, then walked closer and fired again. Bullets struck his head, chest and back. He died at the scene. Investigators recovered five shell casings and a GECO 9 mm Luger bullet.

"It looked like an execution. A few shots at close range and one to finish the job," a Polish officer familiar with the circumstances told Onet.pl.

Police detained two Belarusian men within a day. Neither was charged, and both were released. On June 18, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on X that officers had arrested a suspect at a hostel in Piastów, near Warsaw: Elnur A., 36, carrying a Georgian passport. Polish media report he also speaks Azerbaijani and had lived in Poland before. Investigators have neither confirmed nor ruled out claims that he was paid, or that he is linked to an earlier killing in Warsaw. Prosecutors charged him with murder, which carries a life sentence. He denied guilt, refused to testify, and a Lublin court ordered him held for three months.

Prosecutors say he pulled the trigger alone. Tusk says the government is still hunting for whoever ordered it. Poland has not formally accused the Russian state.

The killing rattled the exile community.

"For the 150th time [I'll say that] we are all at risk -- anyone who volunteers, helps or does things. Take safety precautions," wrote Arkady Babchenko, a Russian opposition journalist and volunteer, on Facebook.

Babchenko knows the arithmetic. Russian intelligence services hired a gunman to kill him in Kyiv in 2018. Ukrainian intelligence staged his death to draw out the plotters, then arrested the mastermind and the man he recruited. Babchenko and his family now live in Estonia.

Prophets with pig snouts

Skrepetsky painted in the style of primitivism, and he aimed low and hard: Putin, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his son Adam, Akhmat commander Apti Alaudinov. His work was deemed suitable only for viewers over 18.

"I remember a striking caricature showing the entire Russian 'elite' -- Kadyrov, [former Russian Defense Minister Sergey] Shoigu, Gundyaev [Patriarch Kirill] and others—in a very derogatory way," a blogger who uses the handle Georg Murmann told Kontur.

His 2022 canvas "Division of Trophies" showed Russian service members looting Ukraine's occupied territories, with Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Shoigu and Kadyrov looking on. In "The Horde," "The Last Parade" and "Cattle Cemetery," he rendered what he called the "deep electorate" — the base of Putin's power — as creatures with hooves, pig snouts and a bottle of vodka. On June 14, the day before his death, he posted the Kadyrovs with snouts and hooves, mocking Adam Kadyrov's latest Hero of Chechnya title.

Kadyrov's supporters had come after him repeatedly, he said. "They figured out my IP address and where I live, called me and gave me two days to make a decision," he wrote, describing a demand that he apologize. The callers promised violence if he refused.

Polish artist Andrzej Fogtt, who works in a similar register, said creative people feel injustice acutely and struggle to stay silent about it. After Russian troops massacred civilians in Bucha in 2022, Fogtt painted a cycle on the killings that hung temporarily in the European Parliament. In Russia's soldiers he sees a species of his own invention: "homo bydlakus."

"Artists are their own type of prophets, and that's why their honest representation of reality so often hits the mark. And of course, that can spark aggression," Fogtt told Kontur.

Vladislav Bokhan, a Belarusian artist living in Poland, said the first reports from Biała Podlaska unsettled him.

"I thought, that's where Skrepetsky lives," he told the BBC. Bokhan said his colleague had supplied plenty of "reasons why people are being killed these days."

The reach across borders

Ukrainians viewed Skrepetsky with suspicion. In January 2025, the unofficial Ukrainian website Myrotvorets, which catalogs suspected crimes against Ukraine's national security, added him to its database for publicly supporting Russian aggression, linking to posts in which he pushed narratives equating the victim with the aggressor.

Civic activist Yuriy Pastushenko told Kontur that Skrepetsky once pledged to donate to Ukraine's armed forces, then turned on it with sharp criticism.

"He was a talented artist, but he hated Putin's Russia and an independent Ukraine equally, and even wrote about it," Pastushenko said. He described the artist as "a very strange combination of anti-imperialism and scorn for the empire's former colonies."