WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish authorities have arrested a man suspected of fatally shooting a Russian activist critical of President Vladimir Putin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and are investigating whether Russia is behind it, senior officials said Thursday.
The killing is the latest act which Polish authorities believe could be part of a campaign of Russian sabotage aimed at sowing fear and demoralizing Ukraine's closest allies. Poland, a NATO and European Union member, has in recent years become a place of refuge for political dissidents from Russia and Belarus, as well as Ukrainian war refugees.
“Early this morning, police apprehended a suspect in the murder of a Russian man — a murder that shocked all of Poland,” Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński told a news conference in Warsaw.
He said the suspect is a 36-year-old man who carried a passport belonging to the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia with links to organized crime and crimes committed in Poland dating to 2022. The arrest took place in a hostel housing foreigners in Piastów, near Warsaw, he said.
Robert Kuzovkov, a 44-year-old known by the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, was killed on Monday morning near his home in the eastern Polish city of Biala Podlaska, near the border with Belarus. Prosecutors said the perpetrator fired two shots at him, then shot him three more times at close range before fleeing.
Kuzovkov, who died of gunshot wounds to the head, chest and back, had painted unflattering caricatures of Putin, Kadyrov and other high-ranking Russian officials. One depicts Putin being cradled in the arms of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. He had refused offers of protection by Polish authorities.
Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s security services minister, said Russia was under suspicion due to the profile of the victim and the way he was killed.
“If, in recent years, murders have been carried out in various countries — for example, in Germany a few years ago — on the orders of Russian security services, then we must seriously consider the possibility that when someone who is an open critic of Putin and Kadyrov is killed in this manner, this is a likely hypothesis,” Siemoniak told the same news conference.
But he stressed that evidence and testimony were being collected and that the prosecutor’s office and the police were not ruling out other motives.
Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday that the killing has the hallmarks of a political assassination, and that if it had been ordered by Russia it “would constitute state terrorism.”
Polish investigators initially detained two Belarusian citizens but released them later, saying they had no evidence that they were directly involved in the killing.
Since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been accused of trying to assassinate its opponents abroad, including targeting exiled activists in France and Lithuania.
Officials in Germany have also broken up plots targeting the head of a German weapons supplier to Ukraine and a Ukrainian military official.
Polish authorities arrested a man in 2024 in what they said was a plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That same year, a Russian helicopter pilot who defected was killed in Spain, with Russian operatives as the prime suspects.
A man identified by Polish media as Robert Kuzovkov and by prosecutors as Robert K., in accordance with Polish privacy law, who they said was an artist who used the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, poses for a photo with one of his paintings near the Russian Embassy in Berlin, Germany, on Friday, June 12, 2026, four days before Polish authorities said he was shot and killed in Biala Podlaska, Poland. (Vasily Krestyaninov/SOTA via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — New York is celebrating the Knicks in classic style Thursday, throwing a ticker-tape parade for the team that brought home the NBA championship longed for by generations of fans.
The Knicks' victory — after a 53-year drought - has electrified New Yorkers, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has predicted that Thursday’s parade might be one of the biggest in the city's history.
The mere fact that it's happening is historic in itself. Although the Knicks won the championship twice in the 1970s, the city didn't host a parade for them either time. Then-Mayor John Lindsay had cut down on ticker-tape extravaganzas for financial and other reasons, and he instead honored the Knicks at a 1970 reception at the mayoral mansion and a jampacked 1973 ceremony outside City Hall.
This time, the city is going all out.
“There will be performances, there will be New Yorkers, there will be the team and there will be history,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday.
The parade is set to start at 10 a.m. Thursday near Battery Park and head up Broadway on the skyscraper-flanked route dubbed the "Canyon of Heroes.” The procession is to end at City Hall, where the players are to get another traditional tribute: keys to the city.
Knicks legends Walt “Clyde” Frazier — a member of the ’70s champion teams — and Patrick Ewing are expected to participate in the parade, according to a person familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details before they were publicly announced. The person said Mike Breen, the Knicks’ play-by-play announcer on MSG Network, was set to emcee the City Hall ceremony.
Alicia Keys, the singer who collaborated with Jay-Z on the New York-loving 2009 hit “Empire State of Mind,” has been tapped to perform.
“How could I not?” Keys said Wednesday in a social media video that featured her on the phone with Knicks forward OG Anunoby.
Police plan to deploy 10,000 officers to secure the event, which follows ebullient but sometimes chaotic street celebrations and some violence during the Knicks' run to victory over the San Antonio Spurs.
“We want people to enjoy this moment,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a planning meeting Wednesday, “but public safety comes first.”
Some 650 sanitation workers have been assigned to clean up what could be tens of thousands of pounds (kilograms) of debris, if recent history is any guide.
Ticker-tape parades derive their name from the narrow strips of paper used by telegraph-era “stock ticker” machines. New York brokerage firm workers took to tossing the paper out their office windows during parades in the late 19th century, adding a swirling aerial spectacle to the festivities.
Over the years, especially up to the mid-1960s, the city rolled out ticker-tape parades to honor visiting foreign leaders, mark historic anniversaries and hail feats in aviation, war, sports, music, space travel and more.
The Knicks' parade will be the 210th, and it comes after a ticker-tape bash for the WNBA's New York Liberty in 2024.
AP Basketball Writer Brian Mahoney contributed from Southampton, New York.
Crowds fill the sidewalks waiting for the start of the NBA Champion New York Knicks taker-tape parade on Broadway, in New York's "Canyon of Heroes," Thursday, June 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Fans line up along the route before the New York Knicks' NBA championship parade Thursday, June 18, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)
Fans line up along the route before the New York Knicks' NBA championship parade Thursday, June 18, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)
A street sign reading "Champions Way" is posted along Broadway known as the "Canyon of Heroes", ahead of the New York Knicks' ticker-tape parade, Wednesday, June 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
A street sign reading "Champions Way" is posted along Broadway known as the "Canyon of Heroes", ahead of the New York Knicks' ticker-tape parade, Wednesday, June 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
Banners hang above City Hall as preparations take place, Wednesday, June 17, 2026, in New York, ahead of the New York Knicks' NBA championship ticker-tape parade. (AP Photo/Alyssa Goodman)
FILE - New York Mayor John Lindsay, right, congratulates Red Holzman, coach of the New York Knicks, after presenting the city's diamond jubilee medals to Holzman and other members of the Knicks team on the steps of City Hall on May 15, 1973. Shown with the mayor are Irving Felt, board chairman of Madison Square Garden, second from left, and Willis Reed, team captain, next to Lindsay. (AP Photo/Anthony Camerano, File)
The New York Knicks celebrate with the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy after defeating the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals basketball series, Saturday, June 13, 2026, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Darren Abate)
