Former Ukraine Parliament Speaker Killed

The former head of the Ukraine's Parliament, Andriy Parubiy, has been killed with firearms in the western town of Lviv on Saturday, and research to capture the suspected hand guard has been launched, Ukrainian authorities reported.

The Attorney General's Office announced that an armed man has shot Paruby several times, leaving him dead in the country. The attacker escaped and was declared at large.

Paruby, 54, was a member of the Parliament and had served as its chairman from April 2016 to August 2019, and was one of the leaders of the 2013 protests seeking closer ties with the European Union.

He had also been secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Protection Council from February to August 2014, in the period when the war in the country's east began, and Russia annexed the Crime Peninsula.

Officials did not show whether the murder is directly linked to Russia's war in Ukraine.

“Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko and Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko just reported on the first circumstances of a terrible murder in Lviv. Andriy Parubiy has been killed”, President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X.

Zelensky expressed condolences to Parubiy's family and relatives, adding: “All the forces and necessary means are committed to the investigation and search for the assassin”.

National police said the Lviv shooting was reported around noon. Lviv's mayor, Andriy Sadovy, said that finding the author and dawning the circumstances of the attack are of vital importance.

This is a security issue in a country that is at war, where, as we can see, there are no perfectly safe” locations, he wrote in the telegram. / REL/