PAVEL SHEREMET sounded characteristically energetic on Ukraine’s VestiFM radio on July 19th: “Welcome, brothers and sisters from Kiev, Kharrrkov, and Dneppppaaa!” It would be Mr Sheremet’s last show. When he set out for the studio the next day, a bomb ripped through the red Subaru he was driving, leaving the 44-year-old journalist dead in Kiev’s city centre. A flower-laden memorial now graces the intersection, adorned with pictures and notes from mourners. One note features lyrics from Vladimir Vysotsky, a Soviet-era folk singer: “Death selects the very best, and pulls them away one by one.”

Mr Sheremet’s killing shocked journalists and activists across the post-Soviet world. A native of Minsk, Belarus’s capital, Mr Sheremet made a name for himself by covering political repression under that country’s strongman, Alexander Lukashenko. He spent three months in prison in 1997, receiving a press freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. He spent more than a decade working in Moscow in television, before leaving for Kiev to live and work with his new partner, Olena Prytula, the co-founder of Ukraine’s leading investigative newspaper, Ukrainskaya Pravda (Ukrainian Truth). He was a strong supporter of the Maidan revolution, but remained a clear-eyed critic of the country’s post-revolutionary leaders.

The order for the hit on Mr Sheremet could have originated in any of the three countries where he worked—a testament to his fearless journalism. Ukraine’s prosecutor general has left little doubt that Mr Sheremet’s professional activity was the reason for his murder. The FBI has been invited to assist with the inquiry. Ukraine’s leaders quickly hinted that Russia was at fault. “It seems this was an act done with the intention of destabilising the situation in the country,” President Petro Poroshenko said on the day of the murder.

Yet Mr Sheremet had plenty to fear in Kiev, too. Before his murder, he told friends and colleagues that he and Ms Pritula were being followed. After the bombing, Ukraine’s prosecutor general promised to investigate allegations that the surveillance was illegally organised by Vadim Troyan, the deputy head of the national police (and a close associate of the head of a far-right militia). Ukraine’s interior ministry has denied the allegations.

Regardless of who organised the killing, the fact that it took place in Ukraine speaks to the atmosphere of impunity that has taken hold in the country since the Maidan revolution. Corrupt officials roam free, and armed “volunteer battalions” operate on their own terms. Those responsible for the killings of the Maidan protestors are still unpunished. Mr Sheremet himself raised the dangers of such injustices in his last post for Ukrainskaya Pravda: “Today soldier-MPs and people in camouflage are, if not above the law, able to paralyse the functioning of the law at will.” The investigation will be a test of the law’s reach.

The killing came amidst growing concerns over press safety in Ukraine. In May, a nationalist website called Myrotvorets released names and contact details of thousands of domestic and foreign journalists who had worked in separatist-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine (including some from The Economist). Human-rights activists and international observers worried about retaliation. But Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, backed Myrotvorets, castigating the journalists as “liberal-separatists”.

Mr Sheremet’s death recalled the assassination in 2000 of Georgiy Gongadze, an investigative journalist who founded Ukrainskaya Pravda with Ms Prytula. Mr Gongadze’s murder has never been solved. Leaked phone calls suggested the conspiracy to have him killed could be linked to a former president, Leonid Kuchma—allegations Mr Kuchma has always denied. Few in Kiev today think the country’s leaders capable of ordering an assassination. But the murder of Mr Sheremet seemed designed for a similar purpose: to frighten free-thinkers and demonstrate the country’s vulnerability to violence. “He became a sacral victim,” wrote Mustafa Nayyem, a former investigative journalist and now an MP.

The killers may have miscalculated. In today’s Ukraine, civil society and the press are harder to cow than they were during Mr Kuchma’s reign, or than they are under Mr Putin and Mr Lukashenko next door. Many Ukrainian journalists have changed their social-media profile pictures to the Ukrainskaya Pravda logo with the caption: “The truth cannot be killed”. At Mr Sheremet’s funeral in Minsk, Ms Prytula brought a message of her own, written on a wreath: “Smile up there, my dear. They won’t stop us.”