A drawing can be more dangerous than a speech - especially if it mocks the wrong man. Russian artist and caricaturist Robert Kuzovkov, known under the name Semyon Skrepetsky, who spent years mocking Vladimir Putin, was killed in Poland. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk says the killing bears "the marks of a political assassination."

The scenario is cold and precise. On Monday, in the town of Biala Podlaska in eastern Poland, an unknown man approached him near his home around 9:45 in the morning, fired two and then three more shots at point-blank range - to the head, chest and back. He died on the spot. Polish authorities initially detained two Belarusian citizens, but released them for lack of evidence.

Tusk was unequivocal: "If Russia ordered this killing, it represents an exceptionally serious international matter. It would be state terrorism." According to him, Kuzovkov had been offered protection, which he refused. Just a few days earlier, on June 12, the artist had posted a video in which he threw a Russian flag in Berlin on a Russian state holiday.

There's something here that concerns all of us. When a state orders the killing of a man whose only "weapon" was a pencil and irony, the message isn't aimed only at the victim - it's aimed at anyone who dares to mock those in power. The Balkans know all too well what it means when criticism becomes a lethal profession. The question isn't whether a single drawing is worth a life - it's what kind of regime is so afraid of a drawing that it sends a man with a gun.