Police officers on the campus of Utah Valley University following the shooting of Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah, USA, 10 September 2025. Photo: EPA / MARIELLE SCOTT
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has blamed the murder of prominent US conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday on “left-wing liberal scum” who support Ukraine.
“Political crimes and assassinations have been carried out lately by a variety of left-wing liberal scum who support Banderite Kiev”, Medvedev wrote on X on Wednesday, citing the murder of Kirk and the attempted assassination of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in 2024.
“Who’s next? Maybe it’s time for the MAGA team to realize that by supporting Ukraine, they’re supporting murderers”, said Medvedev, who took over the presidency from Vladimir Putin for four years in 2008 to allow him to sidestep constitutional term limits.
Kirk, an ally of US President Donald Trump, was fatally shot on Wednesday as he addressed a crowd of some 3,000 people during a rally by his conservative youth organisation, Turning Point USA, on the campus of Utah Valley University in the city of Orem. Police in the US were still searching for the suspected shooter on Thursday.
Commenting on Kirk’s killing, Russian Senator Alexey Pushkov noted that the activist was an “opponent of US involvement in the war in Ukraine” and called his shooting a “clear message to all prominent figures in American public and political life who hold similar views and are not afraid to spread them”.
Russian Direct Investment Fund head Kirill Dmitriev, who has played a key role in engineering closer ties between Moscow and Washington in recent months as Vladimir Putin’s special economic envoy, called Kirk a “voice of light” and retweeted a message from Elon Musk describing “the left” as “the party of murder”, as well as videos purporting to show leftists in “full celebration mode” over Kirk’s shooting.
One of the most recognisable voices on the American right, Kirk was an outspoken critic of both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US aid to Kyiv. In 2023, he characterised the conflict as an “endless war” and called on Ukraine to cede Crimea to Russia, while in February he described Zelensky as a “puppet of the CIA who marched his own people into a needless slaughter”.
While Russian officials were quick to condemn the killing of Kirk, international organisations have repeatedly highlighted Moscow’s own record of violence against journalists and opposition figures. In 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Russia had “long ranked among the worst countries in the world for journalist murders”, with at least 25 journalists killed “in direct retaliation for their work” over the 25 years of Putin’s rule.
