Teenage suspect held over assassination of Ukrainian language advocate
25 July 2024, 15:14
Iryna Farion was gunned down in broad daylight last Friday in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
Ukraine’s president has announced that authorities have detained an 18-year-old suspect over the shooting death of a former legislator who was an advocate for the use of the Ukrainian language instead of Russian.
Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that the suspect in the killing of Iryna Farion, 60, was detained in Dnipro, hundreds of miles to the east.
Ms Farion was gunned down in the street in broad daylight last Friday in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Police said the incident was being treated as an assassination.
“The detention operation was very difficult,” Mr Zelensky said. “Over recent days, hundreds of specialists of the National Police of Ukraine, SBU (security service) and other services worked on solving the murder.”
Ms Farion’s death shocked Ukraine, and several thousand mourners attended her funeral in Lviv.
She was a member of the Ukrainian parliament between 2012 and 2014, and was best known for campaigns to promote the use of the Ukrainian language by officials who spoke Russian.
Russian speakers are common in eastern parts of Ukraine, by the border with Russia, and some long-serving officials speak Russian after years of Soviet rule.
Meanwhile, debris from what is believed to have been a Russian drone has landed in a rural area of Romania, the country’s Defence Ministry said on Thursday, in the latest apparent incident of drone wreckage from the war in neighbouring Ukraine falling on to the Nato member’s soil.
Since the war started in February 2022, Romania has confirmed drone fragments on its territory on several occasions.
The latest debris was found after Russian attacks on Ukraine’s port infrastructure near the border.
A statement said the fragments were discovered by a team of specialists in an uninhabited area near the village of Plauru in Tulcea county, which is across the Danube River from the Ukrainian port of Izmail.
The discovery came after Russia carried out overnight attacks on “civilian targets and port infrastructure” in Ukraine over the past two nights, the ministry said.
Those assaults prompted Romania to deploy warplanes to monitor its air space.
The ministry condemned the Russian attacks, calling them “unjustified and in serious contradiction with the norms of international law”.
Romania’s emergency authorities issued text alerts both nights to residents living in Tulcea, and Nato allies were kept informed, the ministry said.
