MOSCOW — Two unknown men waited for Russian journalist Oleg Kashin to come home and then bludgeoned him on his head, arms and legs. Yet his editor said it was Kashin’s mangled hands — with part of one pinky broken off — that showed that his attackers wanted to make sure he never wrote again.
Kashin, 30, a reporter for the respected Kommersant newspaper, was hospitalized in a drug-induced coma after the attack early Saturday outside his Moscow apartment.
He is the latest in a line of journalists and activists to be assaulted in Russia. In most cases, the perpetrators are never found, but the Kremlin appeared determined to show that this time things will be different.
President Dmitry Medvedev ordered Russia’s prosecutor general and interior minister to oversee the investigation. Russia’s national television networks, which are under direct or indirect Kremlin control, led programs with the news.
“The criminals should be found and punished,” Medvedev wrote in Twitter.
Neighbors witnessed the attack on Kashin, who was jumped as he returned home after midnight. Investigators also have footage from a video surveillance camera outside the building, said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigators.
Kashin’s wife, Yevgenia Milova, said he had received no threats. She wrote in her blog that doctors had operated to put Kashin’s broken jaw back together and were monitoring a skull injury. Only one of his legs was broken, she said.
Kashin’s editor, Mikhail Mikhailin, said Kashin was investigating “informal organizations” but gave no specifics. The phrase could refer to anything from neo-Nazis to environmentalists.
Kashin has written on a wide range of social and political issues, some politically sensitive, others not.
