REQUIEM FOR A HIT MAN: A doomed hired gun unburdens himself in a jailhouse interview that sheds light on the shadow battle between Russia and Ukraine.

In a jailhouse interview with The Wall Street Journal in February, Mr. Makhauri expanded upon the murky world he inhabited, politely answering questions about his life for two hours while handcuffed in a hallway. He worked as an agent, he said, wherever there was a fight against Moscow’s influence, including Chechnya, Georgia, Turkey and Syria. Ukraine, his last place of employment, would turn out to be more hazardous than he reckoned.

Ukraine has become a magnet for hired guns as Kiev tries to fight its former master Moscow’s bid to reassert control. With a stalemate on the battlefront between Russian-backed rebels and the government, Moscow and Kiev appear to have turned to contract killings to settle scores and winnow the ranks of commanders in the war, Western diplomats say.

Most of those killings have been carried out far from the almost daily volleys of artillery in eastern Ukraine, turning Kiev into a hotbed of spies and hit men.

Victims have included the head of a Ukrainian special forces unit, Maksim Shapoval, who was blown up in his car at an intersection in downtown Kiev in June, and a former Russian prosecutor and parliament member, Denis Voronenkov, who had recently fled to Kiev for protection and was shot dead on a chestnut tree-lined boulevard in March.

This one is behind the WSJ paywall, but maybe you can find away around it here.