Death by courier

A staunch defender of the Ukrainian language and a leader of the Euromaidan, the 2013–2014 pro-European protests that led to Ukraine’s geopolitical reorientation away from Russia, Parubiy was regarded by many of his compatriots as a founding father of the country’s post-independence identity.

By contrast, Russian propaganda has for years accused Parubiy of organising a 2014 massacre of Russian-Ukrainians in Odesa, and continues to circulate a long-debunked narrative claiming that Parubiy commanded snipers that shot on protesters during Euromaidan.

Should investigators manage to prove that Russia ordered the hit, as they already suspect, Parubiy will become the most senior Ukrainian politician to have been the victim of a contract killing in Ukraine’s history. Though the shooter, Mykhaylo Stselnikov, claims to have acted alone to avenge the death of his son in the war, his explanation remains unconvincing.

Lviv and let die

A sunny street in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Cars pass by. A man in shorts walks along the pavement, carrying a sports bag slung over his shoulder. He passes a motorcyclist standing by the roadside, wearing a helmet that completely obscures his face. The motorcyclist, who is carrying a yellow Glovo delivery bag, waits until the man has passed by before following him.

Pulling out a pistol, he aims it at the man’s back, walking with his arm outstretched. At this point, both men disappear behind the foliage of a roadside tree. A white car drives past. Eight seconds later, only the motorcyclist reappears. He hurriedly crosses the road, appears to place the pistol into the yellow bag, swings it over his back, and disappears from view. This chance recording was captured by a CCTV camera across the street.

Two minutes after the killing, the police were called. The street was cordoned off, and citywide and regional manhunts were launched. Officers began scouring footage from street cameras and questioning local residents. Some of Parubiy’s neighbours told journalists that they had heard the gunshots, though few understood what was going on straight away. Supporters of Parubiy began to gather at the scene.

Just 20 minutes later, an unknown person made a video of themselves watching and commenting on the surveillance footage. An hour after that, Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda posted that clip on its Telegram channel, noting that “the moment of the killing is being published by local media.”

However, that was the first time the video had been posted online, and it wasn’t until far later in the day that other media outlets began to share the same footage. Caught off guard by the leak, the Ukrainian National Police rapidly began investigating the video’s “unauthorised release”.

Who had been responsible for Parubiy’s murder or what their motive could have been was still unknown 24 hours later. The shooter, of whom the police didn’t even have a description to work from, had apparently vanished into thin air, while all that was known about the weapon, which has still not been recovered, was that it was a pistol from which eight shots were discharged.

Overnight however, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on his Telegram channel that the suspected gunman had been detained. Forty minutes later, Zelensky sent an update on the case, saying that the suspect had given his first statement to investigators.

At a press briefing the following morning, Ukraine’s deputy police chief Andriy Nebytov told reporters that the suspected gunman had been tracked down and detained in the village of Kolodiyivka, close to the Moldovan border in western Ukraine.

After disposing of the weapon and the e-bike he used by dumping them into a lake, the shooter changed into new clothes and burned those he had worn during the attack. Nobody else was detained, though investigators were careful not to rule out the possibility that he had accomplices.

Nebytov said that a Russian connection to the assassination could not be ruled out, and that it was indeed the working theory of the investigation, though he quickly added that all possible scenarios were being considered.

The versions of Andriy Parubiy

Speculation that the Russians could have played a role in Parubiy’s murder began before his body was cold, with the powerful head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, declaring unequivocally that Parubiy had died “from enemy bullets” before any details of his killing had been confirmed.

“Enemies are not able to conquer Ukraine by force, so they resort to terrorism, trying to sow fear, to provoke public tension and chaos to break the will of the Ukrainian nation to resist,” Budanov wrote on his official Telegram channel.

When the head of the Ukrainian National Police, Ivan Vyhivskyi, posted photos of the suspect being detained, he described there as having been “a Russian trace” to Parubiy’s assassination.

Yet, at first glance, Parubiy would appear to be rather a strange target for Russia to have chosen, given that he had long left his positions of power in Kyiv, and that at the time of his death, he was an unremarkable member of parliament with no additional role in the country’s defence or intelligence apparatus who had been largely forgotten by most Ukrainians. Though that wouldn’t necessarily mean that his role in the Euromaidan had been forgotten in Moscow, of course.

A historian by education, Parubiy entered politics as a nationalist during the Glasnost era and took an active role in anti-communist rallies. In the early 1990s, he co-founded the ultranationalist Social-National Party of Ukraine, which later evolved into the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party.

In 2005, Parubiy joined then-president Viktor Yushchenko’s centre-right party Our Ukraine, having earlier served as a commandant during the 2004 Orange Revolution protests. In 2007, he was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, where he was known for his assertive stance when it came to defending the Ukrainian language.

In one particularly notorious incident during a 2010 parliamentary debate on extending the lease for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Parubiy is widely believed to have set off a smoke grenade in the chamber in an attempt to derail the vote.

In the years leading up to Euromaidan, he was a member of parliament for then-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s centre-left Batkivshchyna party. During Euromaidan, Parubiy again took on the role of commandant, and became one of the main organisers of the protest movement’s self-defence forces.

Following the transformative Euromaidan, Parubiy was appointed to head the National Security and Defence Council by acting President Oleksandr Turchynov. He held the post for less than six months, however, stepping down in August 2014 after clashing with Poroshenko over the Minsk Protocols. Nevertheless, as he was still in office during the violent clashes in Odesa that April, Russian propaganda has demonised him ever since.

Indeed, multiple long-standing claims against Parubiy made by Russia’s expansive propaganda networks were quickly revived and put back into circulation following his murder. In addition to being called an organiser of the Odesa massacre, he has also been accused of orchestrating the shooting of Maidan protesters, and of playing a leading role in what Moscow continues to call the 2014 “coup d’état” in Ukraine.

Character assassination

Immediately after his killing, a video began spreading on social media. It shows members of the nationalist Ukrainian political party Right Sector — some in camouflage, others with their faces covered, many carrying sniper rifle cases — exiting what is claimed to be the Hotel Ukraina, also marketed as the Radisson Collection Hotel in Moscow. Parubiy is seen nearby. Russian propaganda has repeatedly asserted that these were the snipers responsible for shooting protesters in February 2014, and that Parubiy was commanding them.

However, the footage was in fact taken at the Dnipro Hotel, located in central Kyiv, which at the time did serve as a base for the Right Sector. The video dates from early April 2014, not February. According to Ukraine’s then-Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, the fighters left their weapons behind when vacating the premises.

The sniper narrative, claiming that pro-Maidan forces staged a false-flag operation by shooting their own protesters, has been a recurring theme in Russian propaganda. As early as 2014, Russian state television aired an interview with Tristan Tsitelashvili, who was described as a Georgian army general, who claimed that former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had sent four snipers to Ukraine to fire on demonstrators and provoke violence.

In 2017, Italian journalist Gian Micalessin produced a documentary for Italy’s TG5 channel that featured interviews with three alleged “Georgian snipers.” Micalessin later appeared on Russian television repeating the same claims.

Ukrainian prosecutors investigated the claim that Georgian snipers were responsible for the killings during the 2014 Maidan protests. However, the investigation found no evidence to support this theory as border control records and airline data confirmed the alleged snipers were not even in Ukraine at the time.

In 2023, after years of legal proceedings, a Kyiv court ruled that the Berkut Special Forces, Ukraine’s riot police, had been responsible for firing on the Maidan protesters. There was no mention of “Georgian snipers,” Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents, or the involvement of Andriy Parubiy.

Parubiy was also mentioned in a separate 2019 investigation into the deadly fire at the Odesa Trade Unions House on 2 May 2014. The case was opened after a complaint by ex-Yanukovych official Andriy Portnov, who accused Parubiy of involvement in the deaths of pro-Russian activists while serving as head of the National Security Council. Parubiy denied all allegations and was questioned only as a witness. No charges were filed, and the findings of the investigation were never made public.

In March 2025, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Odesa authorities bore responsibility for the deaths in the Trade Unions House fire, finding that police, emergency services, and the local administration had failed to prevent the violence. However, the judgment did not implicate Parubiy.

Personal revenge

The day after his arrest, Mykhailo Stselnikov, an unemployed 52 year old, appeared in a Lviv court for a pretrial hearing. Cutting a stocky, greying figure as he was led into the courtroom, he was immediately surrounded by journalists.

Stselnikov managed to surprise all those present in court during his hearing by casually confessing to the killing, claiming to have acted alone to avenge the death of his son in the war. “This is my personal revenge against the Ukrainian authorities,” he said, categorically denying any Russian involvement in Parubiy’s killing.

His son, Mykhailo-Viktor, fought for the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) in the Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolayiv regions, before ending up in Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. He went missing there in May 2023, and although his body has never been recovered, his parents believe he was killed in the fierce battle for the town.

Stselnikov’s ex-wife and Mykhailo-Viktor’s mother, writer Olena Cherninka, wrote a book about having a son missing in action last year. She and Stselnikov divorced in 1998 and have not remained in contact. According to her, Stselnikov had only sporadic contact with his son, and they were not close. When Mykhailo-Viktor decided to enlist in the AFU, the two had a falling out, apparently over political differences.

During the hearing, Stselnikov told reporters that he was simply hoping for a rapid verdict and expressed his desire to be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war so that he could begin searching for his son’s body in the Russian occupied Donetsk region.

When asked why he had targeted Parubiy specifically, Stselnikov replied that it was simply down to geography. Parubiy lived nearby, he said, adding that if he’d lived in western Ukrainian Vinnytsia region, he would have targeted former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko instead.

Despite Stselnikov’s claims that he acted alone, the prosecution’s motion for his arrest stated that he had communicated with somebody after the assassination, and claimed that when Stselnikov reached the Khmelnytskyi region, he received a message instructing him to await further instructions for his escape. However, investigators currently believe he had no accomplices within Ukraine, suggesting that the communication was with someone abroad.

The prosecution requested the court order a two-month arrest period for Stselnikov, and he was remanded in custody without bail until 30 October. Following the hearing, regional prosecutor Serhiy Meret said that investigators had already gathered sufficient evidence to prosecute Stselnikov, though he admitted that the discarded pistol had never been recovered and that the investigators were still unsure how he had acquired it.

Around the same time, a farewell ceremony for Parubiy was held in central Lviv. A requiem service took place at St. George’s Cathedral, attended by figures who had been alongside him during the Maidan protests. Though unable to attend the ceremony himself in person, Zelensky sent his condolences. Parubiy was buried at Lviv’s Lychakiv Cemetery, his coffin draped with the Ukrainian flag and borne by soldiers in ceremonial uniform. In Kyiv, the Verkhovna Rada flew its flag at half mast for three days in his honour.