Video | Russian journalist beaten into a coma

The attack by two unidentified attacks left Oleg Kashin, 30, with a smashed head, legs, and fingers. The attackers were waiting for him when he returned to his apartment in central Moscow just after midnight, neighbours and prosecutors said.

Colleagues at the Kommersant newspaper said Kashin was beaten so badly that he suffered a concussion and fractures to his upper and lower jaw and both lower legs. Following surgery, doctors put him into an artificial coma.

The beating was the latest in a wave of attacks on journalists and activists in Russia. Since 2000, at least 18 killings of journalists have gone unsolved, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Kremlin, however, seemed determined to show that this particular assault would be treated differently, possibly in a bid to improve its worldwide perception that Russia is not the journalistic ‘death zone’ it has been described as.

President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered Russia's prosecutor general and interior minister to oversee the investigation and sent out a message to all of Russia's national television networks, which are under direct or indirect Kremlin control, that they are to lead their news programs with the attack.

"The criminals should be found and punished," Medvedev reportedly wrote in Twitter.

Kashin's editor, Mikhail Mikhailin, said he had no doubt that the attack was retaliation for Kashin's reporting. "They broke his fingers," Mikhailin told a Russian radio station.

"It is completely obvious that the people who did this did not like what he was saying and what he was writing. What specifically they did not like, I don't know, but I firmly connect this with his professional activities."

Mikhailin said Kashin was investigating "informal organizations" but gave no specifics. This could refer to anything from neo-Nazis to environmentalists.  Kashin's wife, Yevgenia Milova, said he had not received any threats, the Interfax news agency reported.

Kashin has written on a wide range of social and political issues, some politically sensitive, others not. His reporting appeared to be straightforward and balanced.

The attack on Kashin came only two days after an opposition activist, Konstantin Fetisov, had his skull fractured in an assault after being released from the Khimki police station, where he had been questioned about a protest.

In 2008, the editor of a Khimki newspaper who was among the first to raise public awareness about the forest was also severely beaten and left crippled. As with most attacks on journalists in Russia, the perpetrators have never been found.