Friends cast suspicion over balcony fall death of Russian reporter

A Russian investigative journalist who covered the deaths of Russian mercenaries in Syria at the hands of US forces has died after falling from his fifth-floor flat.

Local officials say that Maksim Borodin’s apartment in Yekaterinburg, eastern Russia, was locked from the inside, indicating that the incident was unlikely to be criminal. But the editor-in-chief at Novy Den, the newspaper where Borodin worked, said there was “nothing to support a verdict of suicide”, adding that the reporter had “big plans for his personal life and his career”.

Meanwhile, Borodin’s friend Vyacheslav Bashkov said the journalist had called him at 5am on the day before his death, claiming that his building was surrounded by Russian security services wearing balaclavas and that there was “someone with a weapon on his balcony”.

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Borodin phoned back later that morning to say it was a false alarm, according to Bashkov. The next day - Thursday 12 April - Borodin was found badly injured at the foot of his building. He died in hospital the following Sunday.

Another friend of the dead man, opposition activist Leonid Volkov, said he believed Borodin committed suicide out of desperation at the pressure the state was putting on him.

Volkov wrote on Facebook: “This story is not about how the regime kills one journalist who writes on inconvenient topics.

“This is the story of how the regime kills thousands of journalists, all of them embodied [in Borodin], depriving them of any prospect, forcing them to choose between honour and a piece of bread every day.”

Since 1990, a total 346 journalists and other “media staff” have been killed in Europe, with more than 100 of those murders taking place in Russia, CNN notes.

Borodin had written about a group of Russian mercenaries known as the Wagner Group, who were reportedly killed in Syria in February during a confrontation with US forces, the BBC reports.

The group were said to be taking part in an attack by pro-Assad fighters on the headquarters of the Syrian Democratic Forces, an opposition group allied to the US.