Iryna Farion. Photo: Andrey Sadovoy / Telegram
A former deputy in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, died in hospital on Friday evening after being shot outside her home in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, regional governor Maksym Kozytskyi announced on Telegram.
Iryna Farion, 60, was shot in the head at around 7:30pm local time on Friday by an unknown gunman who then fled the scene, Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office said.
Farion was rushed to hospital in a critical condition but died from her wounds at around 11pm, the country’s National Police said, adding that an investigation had been opened into her premeditated murder as efforts to capture the assailant continued.
Local media outlets in Lviv reported that police were looking for a man in his early 20s who had been seen by Farion’s neighbours outside her apartment building on multiple occasions over the past week.
Farion, who was known for being a nationalist and an outspoken campaigner for the Ukrainian language, joined the far-right Svoboda party in 2005 before serving as a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada between 2012 and 2014.
She was most recently employed as a professor of Ukrainian at Lviv’s Polytechnic National University, where she became notorious for her advocacy for the Ukrainian language and her staunch opposition to the use of Russian in Ukraine.
In November, she attracted widespread criticism for saying she did not consider the Russian-speaking members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Azov Brigade to be Ukrainian, and insisting that Russian-speaking Ukrainians should instead “call themselves Russian”.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky assured Ukrainians that the country’s security services were investigating all possible clues to Farion’s murder, “including one that leads to Russia”.
“All available surveillance cameras are being checked, witnesses are being interviewed, and several districts are being examined”, Zelensky said.
Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko said in the early hours of Saturday morning that “personal enmity” and Farion’s “social and political activities” may have been the motivation behind her assassination and that the authorities were not ruling out her murder being a contract killing.
In a statement, the Svoboda party said that Farion had been killed “on Moscow’s orders” as Russia sought to “physically exterminate the Ukrainian elite”.
Serhiy Leshchenko, advisor to Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak, also claimed on X that Farion had been “killed by Russians”, whom he described as the “sole beneficiary” of the murder.
