Ukrainian authorities have detained a suspect in the murder of Andriy Parubiy, a senior politician and former parliamentary speaker, and allege there is a Russian link to the killing.
“We know this crime is not accidental. There is a Russian trace in it,” Ivan Vyhivskyi, head of the National Police of Ukraine, said in a statement posted to Facebook on Monday. Vyhivskyi confirmed a suspect was arrested in the Khmelnytskyi region 36 hours after Parubiy’s murder. Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office said the suspect is a 52-year-old resident of Lviv.
On Saturday — in broad daylight — a gunman disguised as a food delivery worker fired eight bullets at Parubiy in central Kyiv, killing him. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the killer was well-prepared and organized.
Parubiy’s murder is the latest in a string of killings of prominent Ukrainian politicians and activists this year, following the assassinations of former MP Iryna Farion in Lviv and anti-Russian activist Demian Hanul in Odesa.
Parubiy played a major role in leading Ukraine’s pro-Western Euromaidan Revolution in 2013-2014, which ousted the Kremlin puppet regime of Viktor Yanukovych, who is now in exile in Russia. In the winter of 2014, Parubiy served as the commander of protestor self-defense units that clashed with rogue police squads on the streets of Kyiv. He was also one of the top ideologists pushing for Ukraine’s cultural, linguistic and religious exodus from the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.
Russian President Vladimir Putin paints the Euromaidan Revolution as a coup d’état staged by the West and denies the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government. He is also seeking to force Kyiv to fully reinstate the Russian Orthodox church and Russian as a state language in Ukraine as his price for agreeing to a peace deal.
