A suspect in the deadly shooting of top Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy has been arrested, the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.
The parliamentarian, 54, was gunned down on Saturday in the city’s Sykhovsky district by a gunman disguised as a delivery driver, who later fled the scene on a bike.
Ukraine’s interior minister Igor Klymenko said in a statement issued in the early hours of Monday morning that the suspect had been detained in the western Khmelnytskyi region.
Taking to X, Zelensky added: ‘I spoke with Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko. He reported on the next procedural steps regarding the suspect in the murder of Andriy Parubiy.
‘The suspect has given an initial testimony. Urgent investigative actions are currently underway to establish all the circumstances of this murder.
‘The entire law enforcement team and the prosecutors are working around the clock. I thank everyone involved in this work. The National Police and Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Service of Ukraine, the Prosecutor’s Office – everyone is acting as efficiently as possible. Thank you!’
Klymenko said the preliminary investigation had found the killing had been ‘carefully prepared’ with Parubiy’s travel schedule and route mapped out, as well as an escape plan.
He added that Ukraine’s national police force would provide further details later.
Sickening unverified footage showed the killer waiting for Parubiy behind a car.
When Parubiy passed him, the gunman followed him and began to fire bullets into his head and back before fleeing the scene.
At a news briefing on Saturday, Lviv police chief Oleksandr Shliakhovskyi said the gunman had ‘fired about eight shots from a firearm’.
The 54-year-old’s death was confirmed Saturday by the Ukrainian president.
‘Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko and Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko have just reported on the first known circumstances of a horrific murder in Lviv. Andriy Parubiy has been killed,’ he wrote.
‘My condolences to the family and friends’.
Parubiy, 54, was a member of parliament, had been parliamentary speaker from April 2016 to August 2019, and was one of the leaders of protests in 2013 to 2014 calling for closer ties with the European Union.
He was also secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council from February to August 2014, a period when fighting began in eastern Ukraine and Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula.
Officials gave no immediate indication whether the murder had any direct link to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In 2014, Parubiy was victim to an assassination attempt after an unknown attacker threw a grenade at his feet, but he was spared after the explosive device rolled under a car.
Tributes poured in from colleagues in parliament and the government, praising Parubiy’s contribution to Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty and independence as one of the leaders of what became known as the Euromaidan protests in 2013 to 2014.
Former President Petro Poroshenko said on Telegram that the killing of Parubiy, who was a member of the parliamentary committee on national security, defence and intelligence, was ‘a shot fired at the heart of Ukraine.’
‘Andriy was a great man and a true friend. That is why they take revenge, that is what they are afraid of,’ he said, lauding Parubiy’s contribution to building out the Ukrainian army.
Parubiy’s murder comes after unidentified gunmen shot dead a former Ukrainian politician outside a school in a wealthy suburb of Madrid earlier this year.
Andriy Portnov, 51, was previously a senior aide to a pro-Russian former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich, who was in a 2014 popular uprising.
Police reached the scene after receiving calls about a man with gunshot wounds on the street outside the American School of Madrid, in the Pozuelo de Alarcon suburb west of the capital.
‘Several persons shot him in the back and the head and then fled towards a forested area,’ an Interior Ministry source said.
When emergency services arrived they found Portnov dead with at least three gunshot wounds, a spokesperson said.
Portnov left for Russia in 2014 and faced investigations in Ukraine over accusations of treason and embezzlement.
He was targeted with European Union sanctions, although those and the charges were later dropped.
