Former Ukrainian MP Irina Farion, 60, was shot in the head on Friday as she walked down the street in the western city of Lviv. At around 8pm, a man approached the ultra-nationalist and linguist politician and opened fire on her. Farion was taken to hospital from Masaryka Street in the northern part of the city, where the incident took place, but a few hours later, at around 11pm, Lviv Mayor Andrii Sadovii announced her death. “I always say that there is no safe place in Ukraine anymore,” said Sadovii, who described the murder as “bold and brazen.” Police in the city and Lviv region, as well as the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the domestic intelligence service, are investigating the incident. The perpetrator of the murder remains at large.
Farion was a well-known and controversial political voice in the country for his radical stance in defence of the use of the Ukrainian language. His extremism was such that, after the start of the large-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, he questioned the patriotism of the Azov fighters for speaking Russian. “If they don’t speak Ukrainian, let them call themselves Russians (…). If they are such great patriots, let them prove their patriotism,” he said. The members of the Azov battalion, considered by many citizens to be heroes, were the spearhead of the defence of the city of Mariupol, in the east of the country, where many Ukrainians speak Russian in their daily lives.
According to the Ukrainian Interior Minister Igor Klimenko, the lines of investigation being handled would include, first of all, “public and political activities” [de Farion] and personal animosity [del agresor]The main suspect, Klimenko said at a press conference, is an individual seen in the last two weeks near the building where the former MP lives, sitting for long periods of time, wearing clothing that would not correspond to the usual one for summer temperatures. “The shooter had prepared himself in advance, it was not a spontaneous murder,” the minister added.
In 2005, Farion joined the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist party Svoboda (Freedom), the heir to the far-right populist Social-National Party of Ukraine. According to the newspaper Kyiv PostThe politician admitted years ago that she had a communist past during the Soviet Union, although, according to her version, she wanted to “destroy it from within.” In the 2012 elections, she won her seat as a deputy for Lviv, something she was unable to repeat in subsequent elections. Due to her comments towards Ukrainian combatants during the current war, Lviv Polytechnic University, where she taught in the Department of Language, dismissed Farion. Last May, an appeals court in which the former deputy had appealed the decision, reinstated the professor in her duties.
The use of the Russian language, which is natural for a large part of the population of eastern Ukraine due to the proximity of the border with Russia, has become a controversial issue in the country over the last decade. Moscow’s political interference, first, and then the invasion of the territory, have fueled the debate on the use of Russian, considered by many to be the language of the oppressor or the occupier. One of the flags used against Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin, including as a pretext for his offensive, has been the alleged attempt by kyiv to suppress the Russian language in the country.
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