On a Monday morning in eastern Poland, a 44-year-old man crossed a parking lot near his home. A stranger walked up to him and fired two shots. The man dropped. The stranger stepped closer, fired three more, and then disappeared into the streets of a quiet town near the Belarusian border.
That man was Robert Kuzovlov, though almost nobody knew him by that name. He painted under a pseudonym, Semyon Skrepetsky, and for years he had turned Vladimir Putin into a cartoon. He drew the Russian president with a cow’s snout, hugging pigs, or cradled like a baby in the arms of Joseph Stalin. Three days before he was killed, he stood outside the Russian embassy in Berlin and tossed a Russian flag into a trash can.
The shooting looked like a professional job
It happened around 9:45 in the morning in Biała Podlaska, a town roughly 18 miles from Belarus. According to prosecutors, a man approached Skrepetsky on a pedestrian path and opened fire with a handgun. The first two shots brought him down. After he hit the ground, the gunman walked over and fired three more at close range. He was hit five times, including wounds to the head, chest, and back, and he died right there at the scene.
Police flooded the area, set up checkpoints, and started knocking on doors for witnesses. Investigators stopped short of calling it an execution out loud, but the extra shots fired after he was already on the ground told their own story. Whoever did this wanted to be sure he was dead.
Who Semyon Skrepetsky actually was
Skrepetsky came from Russia’s Altai region and left the country in 2021, saying he feared he would be locked up for his art. He settled in Poland and kept painting. His work was loud and strange, sometimes done in the style of Russian Orthodox icons, the kind of gold-trimmed religious paintings you would see in a church, except the holy figure was Putin with a bovine nose.
He didn’t stop at Putin. He painted him next to Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk, Stalin, and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He went after Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko and a top Moscow bishop too. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he publicly burned his Russian passport. In May 2026, he showed up at the Venice Biennale, one of the biggest art events in the world, carrying paintings that mocked Putin.
His last performance was three days before he died
On June 12, which is Russia Day, a national holiday marking the country’s sovereignty, Skrepetsky pulled off one final stunt outside the Russian embassy in Berlin. He yanked a Russian flag out of a slit cut into the back of his pants and tossed it into a trash bin. He had a painting with him showing Stalin holding an infant Putin like the Madonna and child.
The outfit was the whole point. He wore bast shoes, the woven bark footwear that Russian peasants used to wear, an ushanka fur hat, and an orange-and-black St. George’s ribbon, a military symbol that has become a badge of pro-Kremlin support for the war. He filmed it, posted it, and the clip spread through opposition circles online. It was theatrical, ridiculous, and aimed straight at people who do not have a sense of humor about Putin.
He mocked just about everyone
Here is the part that complicates the story. Skrepetsky was not a simple hero of the resistance. He was an equal-opportunity insulter who went after the people you might expect him to defend. He drew Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in 2024, and even Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya. He blamed Navalny for what he called destroying the entire Russian opposition.
He also turned on Ukraine, the country he once seemed to champion. His name landed in Myrotvorets, an unofficial Ukrainian database that lists people it considers enemies of the country. His entry accused his Telegram channel of pushing posts meant to stir up negative feelings toward Ukrainians. After he was killed, someone stamped the word “liquidated” across his profile photo in red.
The threats came rolling in
The Berlin protest got a reaction. Skrepetsky posted on his Telegram channel that the stunt had been, in his own joking words, very popular with Russian patriots. By that he meant the opposite. People flooded him with angry messages, some of them threats of sexual assault, one of them referencing both Kadyrov and Putin directly.
About an hour before he was shot, he posted screenshots of those threats. So the warning signs were not hidden. His friends and supporters say he had been getting menacing messages for a while because of his activism. The timing of it all, threats one day and bullets the next, is exactly why so many people connected the two right away.
Two Belarusians caught near a consulate
The detail that everyone fixated on is where the suspects were found. Polish police detained two Belarusian men, ages 37 and 33, near the Belarusian consulate in Biała Podlaska. That building sits only about 600 meters from where Skrepetsky was killed, which is roughly six football fields away.
One of the men was reportedly caught after he tried and failed to climb the fence onto the consulate grounds. A Belarusian opposition channel claimed he was a taxi driver who had ferried the people believed to have carried out the killing. As of the latest reports, neither man had been charged. Prosecutors stressed they were still figuring out whether the two had any real connection to the shooting, and they remained in custody while the investigation continued.
Poland’s prime minister calls it a political murder
Two days after the shooting, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk spoke at a briefing in Warsaw and did not mince words. He said the killing had the hallmarks of a political assassination. “Everything points to this being a political murder,” Tusk said, while admitting the case would be hard to crack. “If there’s a hired killer involved, it’s unfortunately not easy to identify such a person.”
Tusk also dropped a frustrating detail. He said Polish authorities had offered Skrepetsky protection, and the artist had turned it down. So a man who was posting screenshots of death threats had also waved off the people who could have guarded him. Polish prosecutors stopped short of blaming Moscow directly, and Poland’s Internal Security Agency stayed quiet when asked for comment.
It fits a pattern across Europe
This is the context that makes Polish officials nervous. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the country has been accused over and over of trying to kill its opponents on foreign soil. There were plots aimed at exiled activists in France and Lithuania. German officials broke up schemes targeting the head of a German weapons company that supplies Ukraine and a Ukrainian military official.
In 2024, Polish authorities arrested a man over what they described as a plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That same year, a Russian helicopter pilot who defected was shot dead in Spain, with Russian operatives named as the prime suspects. Polish media covering the Skrepetsky case have been blunt, with some journalists writing about hired killers hunting the wrong kind of Russians.
What we are left with
Skrepetsky was a hard man to pin down. He picked fights in every direction, insulted the Kremlin and its critics in the same breath, and built a body of work designed to make powerful people look foolish. He spent years drawing Putin as livestock and parading around foreign embassies in costume. Then a gunman put five bullets in him in a parking lot and walked away.
No one has been charged with the murder, and the actual shooter is still loose. The two detained Belarusians, the consulate just down the street, the threats posted an hour before he died, and a prime minister using the words “political murder” all sit there as pieces of a puzzle investigators have yet to finish. For a man whose whole career was about provoking a reaction, this was the one he could not survive.