A man walks on the streets of Lopoli, a western Ukrainian capital to hundreds of kilometers from the front. Suddenly, behind him comes out among the cars parked another individual, helmet on his head and backpack of Glovo rider. He pulls the gun out and starts eight shots: the victim collapses on the ground, the murderer runs away quickly.
It is a video surveillance camera that resumes the last moments of life of Andriy Parubiy political Ukrainian and former president of Parliament, leader of Euromaidan protests in 2014 and fervent supporter of the European Ukraine course. A cold -blooded assassination, in broad daylight, which shows how violence in Ukraine is not only that of the fights to the east or Russian raids – 580 drones and missiles only the last night.
And that alarms the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, who spoke of an “carefully prepared” ambush while it is manhunt throughout the country to find the author of the murder, on which the shadow of the involvement of Moscow is stretched. Parubiy, born in 1971, was an activist, legislator and long-term government official: during the Soviet period, he organized anti-government events and was arrested twice, and after the independence of Ukraine he entered politics, being elected in Parliament for the first time in 2007. He participated in the Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2013-2014, he led groups of volunteers for the self-referee during the protests Euromaidan.
After the dismissal of President Filorusso Viktor Yanukovich, Parubiy was appointed secretary of the Council for Security and National Defense of Ukraine. He kept the assignment until August 2014, when the occupation of Crimea took place and broke out the Donbass war. The politician was then the first vice -president of Parliament between 2014 and 2016 and President of Parliament from 2016 to 2019, the year in which he entered the European Solidarity Party of the former President Petro Poroshenko, who spoke of his murder as a “blow to the heart of Ukraine”.
Kiev has officially started a special operation, called Siren, to capture the killer and clarify the reasons for the murder, with the involvement of the SBU, the Ukrainian security services. In paying homage to “a statesman, patriot and intransigent fighter for the independence of Ukraine”, the head of intelligence Kyrylo Budanov said that Parubiy was “killed by enemy bullets”. While according to the police, the Russian involvement track is not excluded: its role at the beginning of the Donbass war and its past in the environments of the Ukrainian extreme right have in fact made Parubiy a frequent target of propaganda and the misinformation of Moscow, and was sought by the Russian authorities since 2023.
Kiev and Moscow are not new to murders of prominent figures of the political world of both countries, in a war parallel to that of the front where in the meantime the fights continue, while the appeals to a respite to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict remain unheard. In the night, the Russian forces launched a record number of 582 drones and missiles against Ukraine, 548 of which are intercepted. The authorities reported by a dead man and 30 injured in Zaporizhzia, a dead man in Donetsk and a victim also in the Kherson.
“When Russia once again proves to care about the words, we count on concrete actions”, it is the lunge of Zelensky who asks the world to put pressure on Putin. But it is not in the intentions of the Tsar to stop an invasion of which it claims success: according to the Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, from March Russian forces have conquered “over 3,500 square km of territory and 149 settlements” in Ukraine. “We check 74% of the Zaporizhzia region and 76% of Kherson, 99.7% of Lugansk and 79% of the Donetsk”, are the numbers illustrated by the general, according to which its soldiers also advance in the Dnepropetrovsk, “where seven settlements were placed under their control”. “We are leading an uninterrupted offensive for the entire front line long,” Gerasimov claimed. And “to date, the strategic initiative belongs entirely to the Russian armed forces”.