Neo-Nazi ex-MP shot dead in Ukraine

20.07.2024 20:44

Former Verkhovna Rada deputy Irina Farion
Photo: Global Look Press / Keystone Press Agency / Anastasiia Smolienko

Outspoken Ukrainian ultranationalist and former MP, Irina Farion, has been fatally shot outside her home in the western city of Lviv, according to local media.

Farion, 60, was a member of the Verkhovna Rada from 2012-2014, and was best known for hard-line Russophobic positions. She was attacked on Friday evening on the street outside her home.

“There was a shot to the temple. The shooter was seen by the neighbors, he was wearing gloves and the weapon did not have a silencer,” local journalist Marta Olyarnik said in a Facebook post.

Farion was rushed to a local hospital. One local Telegram channel reported she was in critical condition, while city councilman Igor Zinkevich described her condition as “serious.”

Several hours later, however, Lviv Mayor Andrey Sadovoy confirmed that she succumbed to her injuries.

“Doctors did everything possible, but the injury was incompatible with life,” Sadovoy said. “It is very scary and terrible that there is no longer a safe place in Ukraine. But for such a brazen, impudent murder, the killer must be found.”

Video from the scene showed a pool of blood on the street. Local media have described the attacker as a young man in his early twenties. The gunman’s identity and whereabouts remain unknown.

Farion was a member of the extreme-right ‘Svoboda’ (Freedom) party, formerly known as the Social-National Party of Ukraine, led by neo-Nazi Oleg Tyagnibok. A Kiev hotel room in which she lived was reported to have been used by far-right activists to shoot civilians during the so-called 'Maidan' coup in the city in 2014. Farion expressed open sympathy for WWII neo-Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

While in parliament, she championed a total ban on the use of Russian language in Ukraine. In January last year, she famously told the media that her grandson Dmitry was hitting Russian-speaking children at his kindergarten. Several months later, she called anyone who lived in Ukraine but did not speak Ukrainian “biological waste.”

This hard line led her to clash with other nationalists. Last November, Farion said that Russian-speaking members of ‘Azov’ were not proper Ukrainians, drawing the ire of Maksim Zhorin and Bogdan Krotevich, two veterans of the notorious neo-Nazi unit.

The Lviv Polytechnic, where Farion was teaching at the time, fired her over the comments. She was reinstated by a court order in May this year.

Moscow has repeatedly condemned Ukrainian laws restricting the use of the Russian language and policies aimed at eroding cultural and historical ties with the neighboring state. President Vladimir Putin has cited “the de-Russification and forced assimilation” of Russian speakers – more than a third of Ukraine’s population – by Kiev as being one of the causes of the current conflict.