Killings are routine in Ukraine, but death usually comes from the air – from Russian drones and shells and missiles, rather than bullets of assassins in the cozy streets of residential areas. Assassinations are not routinized in Ukraine, even though there have been some notable assassination attempts, in particular the heavy poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 and the car accident under disputed circumstances that took the life of opposition leader and 1999 presidential hopeful Vyachelav Chornovil.
Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014 and, especially, its all-out blow-up in 2022, assassinations of top military commanders and intelligence officers far from the frontlines has become quite a widespread practice on both sides. Experts question the practical usefulness of these acts but probably underestimate their symbolic meaning: to enhance the morale of own people and intimidate the enemy by sending the signal that nobody is safe even away from the front and punishment for alleged crimes can reach everybody.
Symbolism is perhaps the rationale for assassinations on both sides, even though their usefulness is even more problematic than undercover attacks on top military. Fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who survived an assassination attempt in 2022 (instead, his daughter was blown up in the car) was barely worth the resources spent on that terror act, let alone the security risks undertaken by executors. But he was dubbed at some point “Putin’s éminence grise” and this apparently singled him out from throngs of other Russian fascist “philosophers”-cum-propagandists.
Russia’s choice of Ukrainian symbolical (non-military) targets is less explicable. A year ago, they presumably organized the assassination of Iryna Farion, a philology professor in Lviv and a former MP (2010-14) from the list of the far-right political party Svoboda. Her finest hour, ironically, had been under the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych when the party for the first (and last) time in its history passed the five percent threshold and entered parliament (largely as a result of nationalistic mobilization, provoked by Yanukovych’s Russification policies). Svoboda’s leader Oleh Tiahnybok was considered the most suitable rival for Yanykovych in the next (2015) presidential elections since he was the only opposition figure who could be beaten by Yanukovych without major falsifications in the tentative second round of the elections (according to various opinion surveys).
This is why Svoboda got a broad access to TV channels while the moderate opposition was effectively barred: their fervent nationalist rhetoric could mobilize many people but, in Ukraine, it could alienate many more. Iryna Farion became a frequent guest on various talk shows, and her unconstrained xenophobic statements were eagerly amplified by pro-government media and their Moscow counterparts. The ultimate goal was to silence and sideline moderates and present radicals, either real or fake, as the only alternative to Yanukovych, paving the way for the rhetorical ground for the eventual myth of rampant “fascism” in Kyiv, and Iryna Farion played a significant role in it.
After the Euromaidan movement and the 2014 Russian invasion, her political star in Ukraine waned, as well as the overblown prominence of all the dummy “nationalists”. Ukrainian society became more concerned with national unity than confrontation, and did not allow radicals to pass the electoral threshold – either in 2014 or 2019. Iryna Farion maintained her firebrand image but her radical statements did not evoke much support or even attention. Finally, at the end of 2023, she overplayed her hand by brutally criticizing Ukrainian soldiers who often speak Russian as their native language. The statement could be tolerated in peacetime since Ukraine is quite pluralistic but hardly during the war where the national unity is of paramount importance and patriotism on the battlefield is not determined by language.
In response to that insult, students called to boycott her, university administration terminated her contract, and a prosecutor decided to scrutinize her statements as possible incitement to ethnic hatred. Under such circumstances, she became absolutely useless for Moscow and could be disposed of. This is just one of many possible explanations, deduced logically; unfortunately, we still do not know what happened, who was the killer and who was the commissioner. What we know is that the Moscow-baked story about “Zelensky’s Nazi regime,” marketable abroad, sounds ridiculous in Ukraine because of its total absurdity. Hence, in Ukraine, Moscow promotes the alternative story – about Zelensky’s pro-Russian conspiracy and his covert desire to sell out Ukraine to Putin. All the true patriots in Ukraine, according to this devilish plan, should be either marginalized or exterminated.
Another assassination that occurred a few days ago in Lviv brought even more confusion to the entire picture. Andriy Parubiy, a renowned politician and civic activist, a member of parliament and its former head (2016-19), was killed in the street by an unknown assassin with eight bullets. Lviv is not the only place where assassinations occur, masterminded most probably by Russia. Demian Ganul, a civic activist, was murdered earlier this year in Odesa, and several military and intelligence officers were assassinated in the past years in Kyiv. But the most western city of Lviv occupies a peculiar place in the Russian (and Soviet) anti-Ukrainian mythology, pictured falsely as a “cradle” of Ukrainian nationalism, fascism, and primordial Russophobia. (In fact, the level of xenophobia in the city is no higher than in the rest of Ukraine, or in neighboring Poland, or Germany, let alone Russia, according to sociological research).
On the face of it, Parubiy’s profile may look similar to Farion’s: as a student, he also began his political career in the early 1990s as a member of Tiahnybok’s Social National Party, eventually renamed Svoboda (Freedom). But, unlike Farion, he broke with Svoboda in 2004, joined the liberal nationalists of Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine, and, in 2016, became a member of Poroshenko’s European Solidarity. Unlike Farion, who was a living curiosity for Russians, a source of valuable quotations that compromised both herself and the Ukrainian national movement in general, with which she was unduly identified, Parubiy was a person of deeds, not words, starting from street fighting with the police in the last years of Perestroika, to fist-fighting with Yanukovych’s tough boys in parliament, to the prominent role he played as protest coordinator during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and, especially, the Euromaidan movement of 2013-14.
The Kremlin had a good reason to hate him, and they hated him from the depths of their hearts: “The blood of thousands of innocent citizens is on his hands,” said the Moscow-based “Komsomolskaya Pravda” in its Parubiy “obituary”. The “blood” here, as elsewhere in Kremlin-baked propagandistic statements, was mostly virtual: there was no “genocide of the people of Donbas” that Parubiy is arguably responsible for as the head of National Security and Defense Council in 2014-16; he had nothing to do with the “Odesa massacre” when the infighting between the supporters and opponents of Euromaidan ended up with the tragic deaths of a few dozen protesters on both sides; and he never sent any “snipers” under a false flag to shoot protesters in the Maidan in February 2014.
“He was a notorious provocateur,” the same newspaper stated. “He even showed up at a rally organized by Navalny and the liberal opposition on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in December 2011”. Ironically, this seems the only real “crime” against Russia he ever committed. But long before he was killed, there were many attempts to assassinate him and, collaterally, the character of the whole Ukrainian government and all of post-Euromaidan Ukraine. One of these attempts, in 2018 (when Parubiy headed the Ukrainian Parliament) was so remarkable that it deserves to be anthologized in textbooks on hybrid wars and unscrupulous propaganda.
On September 4, 2018, the Russian state-owned RIA Novosti featured the headline: “Speaker of Rada calls Hitler ‘the greatest’ democrat”. They published a photo of Andriy Parubiy and quoted him as allegedly saying (in the ICTV ‘Freedom of speech’ program): “I’m a great supporter of direct democracy (…). Incidentally, I can tell you that the person who most practiced direct democracy was Adolf Aloisovich (Hitler) in the 1930s”. And then, reportedly, Parubiy “called on people to not forget the contribution the Führer made to its development”.
Within a day, this “information” was amplified in all Russian mass media and, without further ado and any fact checking, reproduced in hundreds if not thousands of international outlets – from neighboring Poland to Italy, Turkey, and the whole Global South slavishly faithful to RIA Novosti.
Parubiy’s real message, however, was quite the opposite: he warned that direct democracy (a hot topic in Ukraine at the time, as the law on national referendums was discussed in parliament) is not a panacea but can be manipulated by politicians like Hitler: “I am myself a strong supporter of direct democracy. I even studied it at an academic level. Inter alia, I can tell you that the person who most practiced direct democracy was Adolf Aloisovich in the 1930s. And we should remember this since during the 1930s this was one of the key means of manipulation. This law, therefore, must be responsible (well thought out)”.
Nobody bothered to look at the original, to read the full text that was sliced and manipulated, to consider the Ukrainian law-making context in which the debate was held, or pay attention to the speaker’s irony, including his sarcastic reference to Hitler as Adolf Aloisovich – with the Russian-style patronymic that is normally not applied to Western names.
The real question is not why Andriy Parubiy was killed – for Moscow, he is one of many Ukrainian “Nazi leaders” who should be exterminated – but why this happened at a time when he had left the political spotlight, doing mundane and largely invisible work in the parliamentary committee on security and defense. There might be many unknown reasons and circumstances but the simplest assumption is that the killing was, in a way, incidental: Parubiy was an easy target since he did not use bodyguards, lived an open and public life, staying at the same time high enough in the Russian imaginary hierarchy of Ukrainian “Nazis” – high enough to reinvigorate all the propagandistic clichés for domestic audience.
The assassination was cheap and safe: Russians usually do not risk using professional agents for such a job, they try to hire some locals – either for money or some ideological motivation or both. For Moscow it is a win-win game: if the assassin is not caught they can plausibly, tongue in cheek, deny their involvement; if he is caught, no Moscow links beyond some murky intermediary can be traced. In any case, the story feeds two major Moscow narratives: first, about the fraudulent “anti-junta”, “anti-fascist” resistance in Ukraine that allegedly orchestrates the assassinations, and secondly, about internecine fighting in Ukraine – either between “Zelensky regime” and opposition, or between younger “Nazis” who strive to push away the old “Nazis” from the political scene. The narratives do not correspond with each other but it does not matter too much in Russian propagandistic mythology: its primary goal is not explain or persuade but to confuse.
To conclude, the killings in Lviv (and Kyiv), if staged by Moscow, send an encouraging massage to Russians (“we can reach or enemies everywhere!”) and a discouraging one to Ukrainians (“you can’t be safe anywhere, even in your stronghold!”). As the columnist of the popular Rusian newspaper “Komsomolskaya pravda” remarked scornfully: “There are still many candidates under consideration—Turchynov, Tiagnibok, Poroshenko, Klitschko, and others like them. They should take care of themselves so that they can at least live to see the trial”.
Sometimes jesters say the words that kings hesitate to utter.
Mykola Ryabchuk is a research director at the Institute of Political and Nationality Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a lecturer at the George Washington University. He has written extensively on civil society, nation-state building, national identity, and post-communist transition. One of his books has been translated into French: De la 'Petite-Russie' à l'Ukraine, published in Paris by L'Harmattan in 2003.