Last weekend, Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy was assassinated in Lviv. The Kremlin hated him, and may have killed him to send a message to both Ukrainians and Russians, writes political analyst Mykola Riabchuk. Parubiy was not the first to be murdered, and he may not be the last.
Memorial for Andriy Parubiy in Kyiv, September 1st, 2025. Parubiy was murdered in Lviv on August 30. Photo: Sergey Dolzhenko / ANP / EPA
Daily killings have become routine in Ukraine, yet death usually comes from the air—via Russian drones, shells, and missiles—rather than from assassins’ bullets in the quiet streets of residential neighborhoods. Political killings are not commonplace in Ukraine, though there have been a few notable assassination attempts before the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014. The most famous case was the severe poisoning of presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in the 2004 election campaign, and the presumably staged car accident that claimed the life of opposition leader and 1999 presidential hopeful Vyacheslav Chornovil.
Murder as a message
Since 2014—and especially after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022—assassinations of top military commanders and intelligence officers far from the front lines have become a widespread practice on both sides. Their practical utility is up for debate, but these acts hold a symbolic meaning for their Russian perpetrators: the assassinations enhance morale within Russia and intimidate the enemy. The message is that nobody is safe, even deep in the rear, and that punishment for alleged crimes can reach anyone.
Symbolism may also be the main rationale behind political assassinations on both sides, even though their practical usefulness is even less certain than undercover attacks against military leaders. The fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who survived a Ukrainian assassination attempt in 2022 (while his daughter was killed in Dugin’s car), was arguably not worth the resources spent on that operation, let alone the security risks undertaken by its executors. Still, he was at one point dubbed ‘Putin’s brain’, which apparently singled him out among the throng of Russian fascist ‘philosophers’-cum-propagandists.
Andriy Parubiy
Russia’s choice of Ukrainian symbolic (non-military) targets is less easy to explain. This past weekend, Andriy Parubiy—a renowned politician, civic activist, member of parliament, and its former speaker (2016–19)—was gunned down in the street with eight bullets by an unknown assassin. He died at the age of 54.
As a student, Parubiy began his political career in the early 1990s in Tiahnybok’s Social National Party, which was later renamed Svoboda (Freedom). However, he broke with Svoboda in 2004, joining the liberal nationalists of Viktor Yushchenko’s party Our Ukraine, and then, in 2016, becoming a member of Poroshenko’s party European Solidarity. Parubiy was a man of action, not words, from street fights with the police during the start of his political career in the perestroika era, to brawls with Yanukovych’s ‘tough boys’ - bodyguards, drivers and other hacks of the regional mafia-cum-oligarchs who were elected to parliament. Later, Parubiy played a leading role as the coordinator of protests during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and, especially, Euromaidan of 2013–14.
Long before his assassination, there were many attempts to assassinate Parubiy's character
The Kremlin hated Parubiy from the depths of their hearts, and with good reason. ‘The blood of thousands of innocent citizens is on his hands’, declared the Moscow-based Komsomolskaya Pravda in its obituary for Parubiy. Here, as elsewhere in Kremlin-sponsored propaganda, that ‘blood’ is imaginary: no ‘genocide of Donbas’ took place, for which Moscow blames Parubiy as the former head of the National Security and Defense Council (2014–2016); he also had no part in the so-called ‘Odesa massacre’ in 2014, where fighting between Euromaidan supporters and opponents led to dozens of deaths on both sides; nor did he deploy snipers during the Euromaidan Revolution, as part of a false flag operation to shoot protesters. Instead, as was proven in the court, it was the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych and his interior minister who deployed snipers to shoot at the crowd.
‘[Parubiy] was a notorious provocateur’, the same newspaper claims. ‘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 to be the only real ‘crime’ he ever committed against Russia. Long before his assassination, there were many attempts to assassinate his character — and, by extension, the character of Ukraine’s entire post-Euromaidan government.
Reference to Hitler
One of these attempts in 2018, when Parubiy headed parliament, deserves a place in all textbooks on hybrid warfare and unscrupulous propaganda. On September 4, the Russian state-owned RIA Novosti ran the headline: ‘Speaker of the Rada calls Hitler ‘the biggest’ democrat.’ They published a photo of Parubiy and quoted him as allegedly saying (on the TV program Freedom of Speech on the Ukrainian channel ICTV): ‘I’m a great supporter of direct democracy […] By the way, I should tell you that the biggest person who practiced direct democracy in the 1930s was Adolf Aloisovich.’ According to RIA, Parubiy then ‘called on people to not forget the contribution the Führer made to its development’.
Within a day, this ‘information’ spread through all Russian mass media and, without further investigation or fact-checking, was reproduced in hundreds if not thousands of international outlets—from neighboring Poland to Italy, Turkey—and Russia Today, which broadcasts around the world, including the Global South.
Former president Petro Poroshenko speaks during the evening of memories of Andriy Parubiy in downtown Kyiv. Photo: Sergey Dolzhenko / ANP / EPA
Parubiy’s actual message was the opposite: he warned that direct democracy is not a panacea (a hot topic in Ukraine at that time, as parliament debated a law on national referendums), and can be manipulated by politicians like Hitler. What he really said was this: ‘I am myself a strong supporter of direct democracy. I have even studied it at an academic level. Among other things, I can tell you that the person who most practiced direct democracy was Adolf Aloisovich in the 1930s. We should remember this, as it was one of the main methods of manipulation back then. This law must therefore be well thought out.’
No one bothered to check the original, read the full text (which was sliced and manipulated), consider the Ukrainian lawmaking context in which the debate was held, or note the speaker’s irony—including his sarcastic reference to Hitler as Adolf Aloisovich, using a Russian-style patronymic which is usually not applied to Western names.
Timing of Parubiy’s killing
The real question is not why Parubiy was killed—for Moscow, he was one of many ‘Nazi leaders’ they believe should be exterminated—but why now, when he had left the political spotlight to do routine, largely invisible work on a parliamentary committee for security and defense. There may be many unknown reasons and circumstances, but the simplest explanation is that the killing was, in a way, incidental: Parubiy was an easy target because he did not use bodyguards, lived an open and public life, and was still high enough on Russia’s imagined hierarchy of ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ to reinvigorate propaganda clichés for a domestic audience.
The act was also cheap and safe: Russians typically do not risk professional agents for such jobs, but instead try to hire locals—either motivated by money or ideology, or blackmailed. For Moscow, it is a win-win scenario: if the assassin goes uncaught, they can plausibly, with tongue in cheeck, deny their involvement; if he is caught, no direct Moscow connection can be traced beyond a murky intermediary. Either way, the story feeds two core Kremlin narratives: first, about a supposed ‘anti-junta, anti-fascist resistance’ in Ukraine responsible for assassinations; second, about political infighting within Ukraine—between Zelensky’s regime and the opposition, or between younger ‘Nazis’ trying to oust the old guard. These narratives are contradictory, but in Russian propaganda, that hardly matters: the primary goal of such narratives is not to explain or persuade, but to confuse and distract.
Assassination of Andriy Parubiy
Whether Russia is behind the murder of Parubiy remains unknown, although Ukrainian media generally agree that this is the most likely scenario. Ukraine’s police has not made any public statements to confirm or deny Russian involvement. On September 1st, a 52-year-old Lviv resident was arrested in connection with the murder. ‘There won't be many details now’, says Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko. ‘I will just say that the crime was carefully prepared: the deceased's travel schedule was studied, a route was laid, and an escape plan was thought out.’
Murder of Iryna Farion
Parubiy is not the first high-profile murder case in Lviv. Last year, Russia allegedly also orchestrated the assassination of Iryna Farion, a philology professor in Lviv and a former MP (2010–2014) from the far-right Svoboda party. Ironically, she was most influential during Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency, when Svoboda for the first (and last) time cleared the five percent hurdle to enter parliament—largely thanks to nationalistic mobilization provoked by Yanukovych’s Russification and re-Sovietization policies.
Yanukovych considered Svoboda’s leader, Oleh Tiahnybok, to be his most suitable rival in the next presidential election (2015), since he was seen as the only opposition figure Yanukovych could defeat without major vote falsification in a hypothetical run-off (according to various opinion surveys). For this reason, Svoboda was given broad access to TV channels, while the moderate opposition was effectively barred. Their fervent nationalist rhetoric mobilized some people, but in Ukraine it alienated many more.
At first glance, Farion’s profile may resemble Parubiy’s: after all, they were both members of Svoboda. But unlike Parubiy, who was a person of deeds, Farion was a live curiosity for the Russians, a source of embarrassing quotes to compromise both herself and the broader Ukrainian national movement.
Under Yanukovych's presidency, the rhetorical groundwork was laid for the eventual myth of rampant ‘fascism’ in Kyiv
She became a frequent guest on talk shows under Yanukovych’s presidency, and her unrestrained xenophobic statements were eagerly disseminated by both Ukrainian pro-government media and their Moscow counterparts. The ultimate goal was to silence and marginalize the moderates, framing the radicals—real or manufactured—as the only alternative to Yanukovych. This is how the rhetorical groundwork was laid for the eventual myth of rampant ‘fascism’ in Kyiv, with Farion playing a significant role.
After the Euromaidan Revolution and the start of the Russian invasion in 2014, Farion’s political star declined, as did the exaggerated prominence of all the manufactured ‘nationalists’. Ukrainian society became more concerned with national unity than with confrontation, and did not allow radicals to pass the electoral threshold in either 2014 or 2019. Farion maintained her firebrand image, but her fiery statements received little support or attention. Finally, at the end of 2023, she overplayed her hand by harshly criticizing Ukrainian soldiers who speak Russian as their native language. Such comments might be tolerated in peacetime, given Ukraine’s pluralism. But during war, unity is of paramount importance and patriotism on the battlefield depends on actions, not language.
In response to that insult, students called for a boycott, the university terminated her contract, and prosecutors began examining whether her remarks constituted incitement to ethnic hatred. Under these circumstances, she became absolutely useless for Moscow and could be disposed of.
This is just one of many possible explanations, deduced logically; unfortunately, there are still no answers as to what happened, who the killer was, or who ordered the crime. What is known is that the Moscow-generated narrative about Ukraine’s ‘Nazi regime’—meant for an international audience—sounds ridiculous in Ukraine because of its total absurdity. Hence, in Ukraine, Moscow promotes an alternative story: one about Zelensky’s pro-Russian conspiracy and his secret desire to sell out Ukraine to Putin. According to this devilish story invented by the Kremlin, all true Ukrainian patriots will be marginalized or exterminated if they do not resist the authorities.
The significance of Lviv
Lviv is not the only city where political assassinations take place which are supposedly orchestrated by Russia. For example, the civic activist Demian Ganul was murdered earlier this year in Odesa. Several military and intelligence officers have been assassinated in Kyiv in recent years. But the western city Lviv holds a special place in the Russian (and Soviet) anti-Ukrainian mythology, falsely depicted as the ‘cradle’ of Ukrainian nationalism, fascism, and primordial Russophobia. Although in fact, no sociological research supports the idea that xenophobia is higher in Lviv than elsewhere in Ukraine, or in neighboring Poland or Germany, let alone Russia.
In short, the assassinations in Lviv (and Kyiv), if they were indeed staged by Moscow, send a dual message: one, encouraging Russians (‘We can reach our enemies anywhere!’); the other, discouraging Ukrainians (‘Nobody is safe, not even in your strongholds!’). As a columnist in the popular Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda scornfully remarked: ‘There are still many candidates under consideration—[former president ad interim] Turchynov, [Svoboda leader] Tiahnybok, [former president] Poroshenko, [mayor of Kyiv] Klitschko, and others like them. They should take care of themselves, if only to live long enough to see a trial.’
Sometimes, jesters utter the words that kings dare not say.
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