Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Thursday announced authorities had detained a suspect in the murder of Russian exile and artist Robert Kuzovkov, who worked under the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky.
Skrepetsky was a well-known critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was known for his satirical cartoons and a YouTube channel with around 28,000 subscribers. He was shot dead on Monday in broad daylight in Biała Podlaska, a city in eastern Poland about 30 kilometers from the Belarusian border.
According to Tusk and police in the Lublin region, a 36-year-old man with a Georgian passport was arrested under suspicion of being Kuzovkov’s murderer.
Tusk on Wednesday said “everything indicates that this was a political assassination,” but he added that Polish authorities were still compiling “evidence and more concrete findings.”
“If it turns out that Russia was behind this attack, it would constitute an act of state terrorism,” he added.
On Thursday, Tusk appeared to double down on his belief that the murder had been commissioned. “Authorities are working to identify the person who ordered the crime,” he wrote on X.