A former Ukrainian parliamentary speaker and key figure in the country’s pro-European revolution has been shot dead in the western city of Lviv.
The prosecutor general’s office said a gunman had fired several shots at Andriy Parubiy, 54, killing him on the spot. The attacker fled and a manhunt was launched, it said.
Parubiy was a member of parliament, had been parliamentary speaker from April 2016 to August 2019, and was one of the leaders of protests in 2013-14 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.
Unverified footage appeared to show the moment the attacker, dressed as a delivery driver and wearing a helmet, walked up behind the politician and shot him. Ukrainian media reported that the suspect then fled the scene on an electric bicycle.
“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,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X.
He sent his condolences to Parubiy’s family and loved ones, adding: “All necessary forces and means are engaged in the investigation and search for the killer.”
National police said the shooting in Lviv was reported at around noon (9am GMT) on Saturday. Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi said finding the killer and establishing the circumstances of the attack was of utmost importance.
“This is a matter of security in a country at war, where, as we can see, there are no completely safe places,” he wrote on Telegram.
The killing came only hours after Russia launched another huge volley of missiles and drones at targets across Ukraine.
The country has been fiercely targeted in recent weeks as US president Donald Trump’s efforts to get Russian president Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table to end the war have proved thus far futile.
Russia launched 537 strike drones and decoys, as well as 45 missiles, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, which said it shot down or neutralised 510 drones and decoys, and 38 missiles.
The assault overnight into Saturday killed at least one civilian and wounded 28 people, including children, in the Zaporizhzhia region, governor Ivan Fedorov reported, where a five-storey residential building was struck.
The Kremlin on Thursday said Russia remained interested in continuing peace talks, despite the air attack on Kyiv that day, which was one of the largest and deadliest since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022. At least 23 people were killed.
The attack was one of the few times Russian drones and missiles have penetrated the heart of the Ukrainian capital. Children were among the dead, and search and rescue efforts continued for hours to pull people from the rubble.
Hours after the attack, the Trump administration approved a $825m (£611m) arms sale to Ukraine that will include extended-range missiles and related equipment to boost its defensive capabilities, as US efforts to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia appear to have stalled.
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