Brussels: The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in a statement from its Brussels headquarters has strongly condemned the murder of the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kiev, Ukraine.

Babchenko, 41, was shot and killed on May 29, 2018.

“His wife found him bleeding at their apartment, but he died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital,” the IFJ statement said.

The IFJ said the “killing appeared to be targeted, as the gunman apparently waited for the journalist in the stairwell of his building and shot him in the back.”

The head of Ukraine’s police force said that two motives were being considered: his “professional work and civil position,” the statement added.

“After serving as a soldier in both wars in Chechnya, he became a war correspondent and worked for the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station.”

According to the statement, the slain Russian journalist was “extremely critical of the Kremlin, he fled Russia in 2017 after provoking a scandal in a Facebook post that expressed the indifference over the deaths of a military choir and other passengers aboard a Russian plane that crashed en route to Syria.”

He wrote in the Guardian last year that “All the elements of the propaganda machine were engaged.”

He added that the experience was “so personal, so scary, that I was forced to flee.”