On Tuesday, I wrote a column remembering Arkady Babchenko, the Russian journalist who had been reported murdered in Kyiv earlier that day. It began, “I have lost count of the number of political assassinations I have had to write about in the past twenty years. As shocking as the murders feel to me, they have almost ceased being news. . . . [Babchenko] was not the first Russian journalist to be killed. He was not the first Russian exile to be killed. He was not even the first Russian opposition journalist living in exile in Kyiv to be killed there in broad daylight. Nor was he the first Russian opposition journalist to be shot dead as he came home from a store.”

Just as the column was about to be posted, news came that Babchenko was alive. He appeared at a press conference in Kyiv, saying that he had faked his death as part of a sting operation to catch his own would-be killers. Here, finally, was a Russian assassination story with a surprise twist. In Moscow, a placard commemorating Babchenko was removed from the façade of the House of Journalists. At the editorial offices of Novaya Gazeta, to which Babchenko used to contribute, a memorial bouquet was dismantled, and each of the women in the office got a rose. Commemorative events in Moscow and Kyiv turned into celebrations. Babchenko, who had already had the opportunity to read dozens of his own obituaries, was expected to attend his own memorial celebration in Kyiv’s central square.

To make sense of this bizarre story, one has to understand three things: what made Babchenko a target, why the assassination attempt failed, and what happens now.

Babchenko, who is forty-one, came to journalism from the Army. He was shipped to fight in the Russian war in Chechnya as a nineteen-year-old conscript, in 1995; when Moscow launched its second offensive against the rebellious region, in 1999, Babchenko signed up to fight again. When he returned to Moscow, he started writing, working as a war correspondent for a succession of Moscow publications. He covered the Russian wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and, eventually, Ukraine. He also wrote fiction about the war in Chechnya. He began identifying as a pacifist, and swore never to pick up a gun again. He also covered natural disasters in Russia and uprisings abroad. In 2013, he was detained and beaten by Turkish police while filming protests in Istanbul.

During the mass demonstrations against falsified elections in Russia in 2011 and 2012, Babchenko, who was an active and vocal participant, wrote a blog post in which he called on protesters to resist police and to set up camp instead of dispersing. For this post, he faced charges of attempting to incite a riot, but they were eventually dropped. During the political crackdown that began after Vladimir Putin officially took the office of President for the third time, in May, 2012, many of the activists affiliated with the protests were forced to leave the country, while several others were jailed, and one—Boris Nemtsov—was killed. Babchenko complained that he no longer had anyone to talk to or any publications in which to publish his articles, but he stayed in Moscow.

It wasn’t until February, 2017, that a combination of threats—of legal persecution and death—forced Babchenko to leave Russia. He first went to Prague, then to Tel Aviv, where I saw him in June of last year. I was on a reporting trip in Israel, spending most of my evenings at a café recently opened by new political exiles from Russia. A small crowd of similarly new arrivals gathered there every night, and Babchenko was always among them, chain-smoking, sometimes reporting back on his fruitless negotiations with the local authorities. Like many people in that crowd, he seemed shell-shocked and uncertain of who he was, or where. His journalism was now confined to his blog. He called it “journalism without mediators,” and he encouraged readers to make any payments they saw fit. Every post was accompanied by information on how to make a contribution. One evening, I didn’t find him at the café, and the owner told me that he had left the country. We later learned that he had decided to move to Kyiv, where he continued to write about Russian politics and, especially, the Russian war against Ukraine, making it clear in every post that his sympathies, and now his loyalty, were with Ukraine. Sometimes he mentioned getting death threats, which he believed were linked directly to the Putin administration.

On Tuesday, Babchenko posted a photo of a helicopter on his blog. The caption explained that on this day, many years ago, a commanding officer denied him a seat on that helicopter, which was shot down less than an hour later. “Since then, I consider May 29th to be my second birthday,” he wrote. In another few hours, news broke that Babchenko had died after being shot in the back three times as he returned to his Kyiv apartment from a store.

According to officials who spoke in Kyiv on Wednesday, Russian secret police hired a Ukrainian citizen to find someone who would kill Babchenko. This middleman, who has been identified only by the initial G., contacted several veterans of the Russian-Ukrainian war, offering thirty thousand dollars for the hit, and one of these men reported the conversation to law enforcement. A month ago, the security services contacted Babchenko to begin setting up a sting operation.

The details of the sting are not entirely certain, but it appears that a man coöperating with the investigation posed as the assassin. Babchenko’s wife informed a journalist friend that Babchenko had been shot and was pronounced dead in the ambulance. She described having heard three loud claps and running out of the bathroom to find her husband in a pool of blood; it’s not clear whether the sting operation involved actually faking the murder or merely reporting that it had taken place, though a photo of Babchenko’s supposed body did circulate. (It’s also unclear whether Babchenko’s wife knew of the operation.) The next day, law-enforcement spokespeople announced that Babchenko was alive and that the middleman had already been arrested. It appeared that May 29th had become not only Babchenko’s second birthday but also his third.

Ukrainian security services claim to have proof that the middleman was hired by their Russian counterpart, the F.S.B. Babchenko offered one piece of evidence: the ostensible assassin, he said, had been shown a photograph of Babchenko taken twenty-five years ago, when he obtained his first internal passport. (At the time, the document, a sort of universal domestic I.D., was issued three times in a Russian citizen’s life: at sixteen, twenty-five, and forty-five.) Babchenko claims that the photo could be obtained only from security-service files. If he is right, then he is also providing evidence of the F.S.B.’s glaring incompetence: a twenty-five-year-old photo wouldn’t be of use for an assassin trying to identify his mark, nor would it be necessary, considering that contemporary pictures of Babchenko are numerous and easy to find.

The official Russian reaction to Babchenko’s resurrection and Kyiv’s accusations has so far been limited to a statement by the foreign-ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who said, “That Babchenko is alive is the best news. That’s what should always happen. Too bad other times it wasn’t a masquerade.” Zakharova’s trademark tone of generalized mockery can serve as a preview of Russia’s future reaction to the case. Moscow officials will surely deny all involvement, boast that if they had wanted to kill Babchenko they’d have found a way, and stress that Kyiv undermined its own credibility by faking an assassination.

The world’s two largest journalist-safety organizations are angry. Reporters Without Borders condemned the sting for misleading the public. The Committee to Protect Journalists has demanded that Kyiv explain why deception was necessary and unavoidable. Babchenko said on Wednesday that “there were no other options.”

Whether or not there were indeed other options for apprehending G., the story of the staged murder of a journalist will make it easier for dictators to cast any future murders of reporters as “fake news.” But that doesn’t make the threat Babchenko faced any less real.