And then the news came that Babchenko had been killed. I spent the afternoon reading about him and taking in the social media reaction. The head of the state-sponsored Russian broadcaster RT calmly explained on her Telegram channel that “everyone knows” that if you’re in danger for defying the Kremlin, you shouldn’t go to Kiev! “But may he rest in peace anyway,” she said. Another poster was more direct: “Bye,” he wrote, adding a homophobic slur.

The Russian-American hockey writer Slava Malamud, who has long criticized Ovechkin for his poor leadership, his selfishness and for his politics — Ovechkin announced on Instagram that he was heading up a social movement to back Putin’s re-election — took to Twitter to put two and two together. Babchenko had been killed, he said, and people like Ovechkin who supported this murderous regime had made it possible: “This, #Caps fans, is your boy’s idol,” he wrote. Before too long, Malamud, who lives in Maryland, was receiving death threats himself.

I spent the evening reading Babchenko’s book about Chechnya. Malamud was right, of course: Hockey is just a game; to enjoy Ovechkin’s prowess on the ice — he is not my favorite player, but the sheer force and exuberance of his game is something to behold — is to support, however obliquely, the continuation of a terrible regime.

The next morning I woke up to learn that Babchenko’s “death” had been a sting operation carried out by the Ukrainian security services. As officials proceeded to claim at a news conference attended by Babchenko, they had learned that a former Ukrainian fighter had been hired to assassinate Babchenko. But the fighter decided to cooperate with the authorities; the news of the killing had been meant to entrap the person who had hired the assassin. That person was now in custody, the Ukrainians announced.

Babchenko was not dead. “I’m not going to give them the satisfaction,” he told reporters.

This was good news! Babchenko was alive. Though announcing his death wasn’t, maybe, the best way of going about catching his would-be assassin — from now on, news of another Kremlin opponent killed is going to be treated with justified skepticism. Already some people believe that these events are staged — the Russians, for example, have been implausibly insisting for years that it was a Ukrainian fighter jet, not a Russian missile, that took down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in August 2014. In that case, the evidence that it wasn’t the Ukrainians is overwhelming. But here was a literal fake operation.

Also, it was not good news, if the Ukrainian authorities were telling the truth, that someone had been hired to assassinate Babchenko to begin with. And it didn’t change the fact that other journalists and activists had been killed and that in Russia it has become common for government critics to be arrested, imprisoned and tortured.