12 Facts About Viktor Popkov

Viktor Alekseyevich Popkov was a Russian dissident, Christian, humanitarian, human rights activist and journalist.

Viktor Popkov died on June 2,2001, after being shot during a drive-by shooting while working as an aid worker in Chechnya days earlier.

Viktor Alekseyevich Popkov was born on 17 June 1946, in Krasnodar, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.

Viktor Popkov studied physics in Moscow but left without graduating, instead becoming a journalist and a seismologist in Kamchatka.

In 1992, Viktor Popkov founded and then led the interdenominational and inter-ethnic human rights group Omega, set up to promote dialogue between different ethnicities and religious denominations in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.

Viktor Popkov joined the Memorial Human Rights Center, a leading Russian human rights group, and worked as a freelance journalist for the oppositionist newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Viktor Popkov began working in Chechnya in 1995 during the First Chechen War, where he helped negotiate the release of dozens of civilian hostages and prisoners of war, and was a frequent visitor to Grozny during the heavy fighting, where he helped release some of the Russian prisoners of war held in the Presidential Palace in Grozny just before the Russian bombing in 1995.

Viktor Popkov was frequently detained and threatened by some of the Chechen field commanders.

On 2 June 2001, Viktor Popkov was assassinated near the village of Alkhan-Kala, Chechnya, while delivering medical supplies to civilians after a battle had recently taken place there.

Viktor Popkov's ambulance was ambushed in the vicinity of a Russian Army checkpoint by masked gunmen in a Lada car, who opened fire with an automatic weapon and then drove away.

Viktor Popkov's condition was irreversibly aggravated when the troops at the checkpoint held him, his driver, and a Chechen doctor Rosa Muzarova for reportedly one to three hours following the shooting.

Viktor Popkov died in the Vishnevsky 3rd Central Military Clinical Hospital in Krasnogorsk, Moscow Oblast, without regaining consciousness, leaving behind a seriously ill widow Tatyana and a disabled daughter Ulyana.