Former Russian Lawmaker And Putin Critic Killed In Ukraine

A former Russian parliamentarian who fled the country last year was shot and killed in Kiev, Ukraine on Thursday. Ukraine's president quickly labeled it an act of Russian "state terrorism."

Someone murdered a former member of the Russian Parliament yesterday. He once backed President Vladimir Putin. He stopped doing so and was living in the capital of Ukraine, which is where he was killed. NPR's Lucian Kim reports from Kiev that the murder has shocked Russians who sought safety there.

LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: I'm standing on the street corner where Denis Voronenkov was killed in broad daylight Thursday. He was shot in front of the Premier Palace Hotel, where Kiev's movers and shakers like to meet. A few hours later, there's not a trace of the crime. People hurry by as Kiev's rush hour traffic roars past.

Reporters at the Kyiv Post, the city's English-language newspaper, were working in their offices next door when they heard the shots ring out. Within minutes of the gunfire, Brian Bonner, the paper's editor, was at the crime scene.

BRIAN BONNER: I didn't recognize the dead man. There was no police, no tape. He was just laying there in a pool of blood, obviously dead.

KIM: The killer was fatally injured by Voronenkov's bodyguard. And officials later identified the man as a Ukrainian citizen who was working as a Russian agent. Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, said the murder was, quote, "an act of state terrorism by Russia." The Kremlin called the accusations absurd.

KIM: Russian state television suggested murky business disputes could be behind the murder or perhaps Ukrainian nationalists upset about Voronenkov's earlier support for the annexation of Crimea. Voronenkov and his wife, the opera singer Maria Maksakova, used to be members of the Russian Parliament and ardent supporters of President Putin's policies.

Then last fall, the couple defected to Kiev, where Voronenkov made a U-turn and compared Putin's Russia with Nazi Germany. He took Ukrainian citizenship and promised to reveal new information about the Maidan, the 2014 People Power Revolution that led to Russia's military intervention in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian prosecutors opened a corruption case against Voronenkov. A month ago, a Ukrainian TV journalist asked him if he felt he was in danger.

KIM: "Of course," he said, recalling a prominent muckraking journalist who was killed in a car bombing in central Kiev last July. Russians who moved to Kiev thinking they would enjoy greater political freedom are concerned. I met Yuliya Arkhipova in a bohemian Kiev bar on the night of Voronenkov's killing.

YULIYA ARKHIPOVA: Somebody wants us to be frightened. Somebody wants us to think that Ukraine is not a safe place for Russians. And I don't like it at all.

KIM: Arkhipova moved to Kiev because she was inspired by the Maidan revolution and felt limited in the human rights work she could do in Moscow. Now, the 23-year-old runs an NGO that supports Russians seeking exile in Ukraine.

ARKHIPOVA: The truth is in Ukraine it's OK to be Russian and to speak Russian and to stay here being Russian.

KIM: She says given the level of anti-Ukrainian propaganda on Russian state media, any Russian who comes to Kiev is already making a political statement. Lucian Kim, NPR News, Kiev.</s>A former Russian lawmaker Denis Voronenkov was shot and killed in Kiev Thursday in what the Ukrainian president described as an "act of state terrorism" by Russia, an accusation that has been quickly rejected by the Kremlin.

President Petro Poroshenko said Voronenkov's killing "clearly shows the handwriting of Russian special services shown repeatedly in various European capitals in the past."

In a statement released by his spokesman, Svyatoslav Tsegolko, Poroshenko described the victim as a key witness who gave testimony about "Russian aggression" to the Ukrainian authorities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed the claim of Russian involvement in the killing as "absurd" in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.

Voronenkov, 45, a former member of the communist faction in the lower house of Russian parliament, had moved to Ukraine last fall and had been granted Ukrainian citizenship.

He testified to Ukrainian investigators as part of their probe into the activities of the nation's former Russia-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted by massive protests in February 2014.

Voronenkov, who had obediently toed the Kremlin line while serving as lawmaker, became a vociferous critic of Russian policies after his move to Kiev.

Ukrainian police said Voronenkov was shot dead by an unidentified gunman near the entrance of an upscale hotel in the Ukrainian capital.

The assailant also wounded Voronenkov's bodyguard, who fired back and wounded the gunman. Police said they were both hospitalized.

Voronenkov left Russia with his wife, singer Maria Maksakova, who was also a lawmaker. He said he had to leave Russia because of persecution by Russian security agencies and had renounced Russian citizenship.

After Voronenkov's move to Ukraine, Russian investigators have filed fraud charges against Voronenkov in connection with his business activities.

Members of the Russian parliament were quick to reject Ukrainian allegations that Voronenkov could have been killed over any betrayal of Russia.

Nikolai Kovalyov, the former Russian security chief who is a lawmaker, told Russian state television that the killing could have been rooted in a business dispute.

Peskov said that Putin was informed about Voronenkov's killing and voiced hope that Ukrainian authorities would solve the crime. He added that Voronenkov's widow was welcome to return to Russia.</s>A Russian politician and prominent critic of Vladimir Putin, Denis Voronenkov, was killed in the streets of Kiev on Wednesday, having fled Russia last October in fear of his life.

Voronenkov – a former Russian MP who had previously testified against the pro-Russian former Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, and criticized Vladimir Putin’s policies – was shot three times with a 9mm handgun in broad daylight in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

His bodyguard, a Ukranian security agent, was also shot and remains in the hospital but managed to return fire and fatally wound the gunman, who has not yet been identified.

Voronenkov and his wife Maria Maksakova fled Russia in October last year, citing the ‘schizophrenic’ Russian government as their reason. The couple recently had a son, whose first birthday will be in April.

Following the incident, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described it as “an act of state terrorism” undertaken by the Kremlin.

However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refuted the claims, stating that “all falsehoods that can already be heard about much-hyped Russian involvement are absurd.”

The murder was quickly denounced as an act of Russian violence, with Ukranian MP Volodymyr Ariev accusing Putin of “spreading fear all over the world”:

Meanwhile, Ilya Ponomarev, another former Russian MP exiled in Ukraine and fellow critic of Putin, confirmed he had been on his way to meet Voronenkov before hearing news of his murder.

“There are no words,” he wrote:

It will likely heighten tensions existent between Russia and the Ukraine since Putin illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.

In his final interview with Radio Free Europe last month, Voronenkov compared Russia to “Nazi Germany” while denouncing the annexation of Crimea as “illegal” and a “mistake.”

“In Russia, there is a system of total fear,” Voronenkov said in the interview. “Like in George Orwell’s book [1984], right now these are times of total lies, when speaking the truth is [labeled] extremism.”

Voronenkov’s murder is one of a number of unexplained deaths of Russian dissidents in recent years. In February, thousands marched in the city of Moscow to commemorate the death of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered outside the Kremlin two years ago.

Other influential Russian figures have also died in mysterious circumstances during recent years, including former Putin adviser Mikhail Lesin, businessman Alexander Perepilichny, and FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko. All figures appeared to pose a threat to Russian governmental interests.

You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.</s>According to Meduza , Voronenkov was leaving the hotel with his bodyguard when he was shot. The bodyguard returned fire and wounded the shooter. The alleged assassin was subsequently taken to a Kiev hospital. The bodyguard also sustained injuries in the shootout.

Denis Voronenkov, formerly a Communist Party lawmaker in the State Duma, was killed outside Kiev's Premier Palace hotel March 23, according to multiple sources. Kiev Police Chief Andrei Krishchenko said the murder was likely a contract killing, the Meduza news site reported.

A former Russian parliamentarian who fled to Ukraine and harshly criticized the Russian authorities has been shot dead in Kiev.

Ilya Ponomaryov, another former Russian lawmaker and Kremlin critic living in exile in Kiev, wrote on Facebook that Voronenkov was killed at 11:25 a.m. while heading to a meeting with him.

Voronenkov was "an investigator who was deadly dangerous for the [Russian] security agencies," Ponomaryov wrote.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the killing an "act of terrorism by Russia" that displayed the "signature of the Russian special services, as repeatedly seen in different European capitals."

Voronenkov served in the State Duma until October 2016, when he lost his seat in parliamentary elections. Having lost parliamentary immunity, he fled a corruption investigation, escaping to Kiev with his wife, former United Russia lawmaker Maria Maksakova.

In December 2016, Voronenkov received Ukrainian citizenship. The next month, he testified against ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych before the country's Prosecutor General.

In February, Russia launched large-scale fraud charges against the former parliamentarian after he gave a provocative interview to the Ukrainian media outlet Censor.net.ua.

During the interview, he said that Russia was in the grip of a "pseudo-patriotic frenzy” similar to Nazi Germany, and claimed that it was a “mistake” for Russia to annex the Crimean peninsula.</s>A former Russian politician and critic of Vladimir Putin has been shot dead in Kiev after fleeing his homeland last year, Ukrainian police said.

Denis Voronenkov was shot by a gunman at the entrance of an upmarket hotel in the Ukrainian capital, Ukrainian police said.

Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko told the television channel 112 that Voronenkov was killed around noon (10.00am GMT) and his bodyguard was also injured in the attack.

Mr Voronenkov, 45, had moved to Ukraine last autumn fearing for his life after being a critic of Putin .

He is a former member of the communist faction in the lower house of Russian parliament.

Mr Voronenkov left Russia with his wife, the singer Maria Maksakova.

He had been granted Ukrainian citizenship.

She was also a member of parliament.

He said he had to leave Russia because of persecution by Russian security agencies.

He also renounced his Russian citizenship.</s>Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian lawmaker who fled the country last year and has harshly criticized president Vladimir Putin, was gunned down outside of a Kiev hotel Thursday in what Ukraine’s president is calling an “act of Russian state terrorism.”

A critic of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Voronenkov was helping prosecutors build a treason case against ex-Ukrainian president and Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych, who has lived in exile in Russia since early 2014. Another former Russian parliament member and Putin critic, Ilya Ponomarev, said Voronenkov was on his way to meeting with him when he was killed.

Ukraine’s General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko called the shooting a “cynical murder of one of the witnesses involved in the state’s case against ex-president Yanukovych.” He also referred to it as a “typical show execution of a witness by the Kremlin.”

Not long after the killing, the Kremlin dismissed any suggestion that it was involved. “We believe that all speculations about a Russian connection are absurd,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “We hope that the killer and those behind the murder will be exposed.”</s>Denis Voronenkov was shot dead outside his hotel in Kiev

Denis Voronenkov was killed in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev at noon today, the city's police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said.

His bodyguard was injured in the attack, as was another person.

The former Russian MP and father-of-one was shot dead outside the Kyiv Premier Palace Hotel.

He was in Kiev to testify against former Ukrainian President Yanukovych, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Mr Voronenkov, who was previously a staunch Putin supporter, fled Russia last October and renounced his citizenship after defecting to Ukraine.

He revealed earlier this year he was helping Ukrainian prosecutors building a treason case against Mr Yanukovych, who fled to Russia during unrest in Ukraine in February 2014.

The ex-Ukraine president is suspected of ordering the killings of more than 100 protesters in Kyiv.

Mr Voronenkov and his wife, renowned opera singer Maria Maksakova, who was also a Russian lawmaker, feared they would be killed after defecting.

In February, he told journalist Christopher Miller Russia today is like "Nazi Germany" and the 2014 annexation of Crimea was a "mistake and illegal".

He claimed Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) - which replaced the KGB, of which Mr Putin was an operative - "hounded" him out of Russia.

He said he felt relatively safe in Kyiv, despite raising concerns about the FSB.

Please refresh or return for updates...</s>A Russian lawmaker and critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin who defected to Ukraine late last year was shot dead in Kiev at around noon local time on Thursday, multiple media outlets have reported.

Denis Voronenkov, a former member of the Russian state Duma, or parliament, had obtained Ukrainian citizenship in October in exchange for agreeing to testify against former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych was ousted in early 2014 amid violent protests and fled to Russia, where he is now living under the protection of the Kremlin.

Voronenkov told RFERL's Chris Miller in February that he had told Ukrainian prosecutors "some details of what was going on" with Yanukovych when he fled to Russia, "and I will give testimony in open court in the course of judicial inquiry held in Ukraine."

"I will talk about criminal deeds of the former president, which led to the ongoing bloodshed in [the eastern Ukrainian] Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Voronenkov told Miller last month.

Voronenko had been walking to meet with Ilya Ponomarev, another former member of the Russian Duma who was the only lawmaker to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

"Denis Voronenkov was killed at 11:25 at the Premier Palace," Ponomarev, who also defected to Ukraine, wrote on Facebook on Thursday.

"He was coming to meet with me. No words. The guard managed to wound the attacker. The theory is obvious — I said that Voronenkov was not a crook/cheater/phoney, but an investigator, who was fatally dangerous to Russian siloviki [security services]. My deepest condolences to [Voronenko's wife] Maria Makasakova."

Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, confirmed in a statement on Thursday that " Voronenkov was one of the main witnesses of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and, in particular, the role of Yanukovich regarding the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine."

Voronenkov was also on Russia's federal "wanted" list, Russian news agency Interfax reported last month.

Poroshenko added that he was treating the attack as "an act of Russian state terrorism," although police have still not determined who was behind the assassination.

The attacker, who has not been named, was shot and injured by police and has since died from his wounds, Ukrainian media has reported.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, called the attack “the usual kind of Kremlin retribution," according to The Guardian.

"Putin respects enemies, but he has no time for traitors," Russian-born journalist Julia Ioffe tweeted on Thursday.

Voronenkov has his own enemies in Ukraine, especially because he is believed to have voted in favor of annexing Crimea in 2014. He called the annexation "a mistake" and "illegal" in his February interview with Miller, and denied that he had voted for it.

Voronenkov's death is the second suspicious incident this week involving critics of Vladimir Putin. Nikolai Gorokhov, the lawyer who had been investigating the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky — who died in prison in 2009 after claiming that the Kremlin conspired with Russian criminals to launder $230 million — was thrown from the window of his fourth-floor Moscow apartment on Tuesday.

Russian state media reported that Gorokhov, who has been hospitalized with serious head injuries, had fallen while trying to move a bathtub into his apartment, but the circumstances surrounding the incident remain unclear.</s>KIEV — A former Russian member of parliament who defected to Ukraine and began sharply criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin was gunned down Thursday in downtown Kiev in an apparent contract killing.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the murder of Denis Voronenkov, a former member of Russia’s Communist Party who fled to Kiev in October 2016, an “act of state terrorism by Russia.”

A suspected assailant was arrested after Voronenkov was shot twice in the head, dying on the spot. The suspect’s identity or other details were not immediately made public. In Moscow, a Kremlin spokesman denied Russian involvement in the killing.

But Russia’s critics were likely to draw parallels between the slaying and the deaths of other Putin foes. It also raises further alarm in Washington, where Russia has come under scrutiny for allegedly trying to influence the presidential election to aid Donald Trump.

In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday evening — less than 72 hours before his death — Voronenkov complained about anonymous threats against him and his wife, Maria Maksakova, a former member of the United Russia party founded by Putin, with whom he fled to Kiev last year.

After receiving Ukrainian citizenship in December, he testified in the case against Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian leader who was toppled in 2014 revolution after dozens of protestors were killed in shooting in downtown Kiev.

Before fleeing Russia, Voronenkov was the target of a fraud investigation. He was formally charged in February after a high-profile interview where he compared the patriotic fervor in Russia to Nazi Germany.

Voronenkov said the charges against him over a corporate raiding case had been fabricated by his political enemies.

On Tuesday, he called the Russian state under Putin “totalitarian,” said he had always opposed Russia’s annexation of Crimea despite having voted for it in 2014 in parliament. He said he planned to live in Kiev for the foreseeable future, where he had friends in the pro-Western bureaucracy from his time in the Soviet army.

He could likely return to Russia only after Putin’s death, he said.

In the three years since Ukraine’s revolution, Kiev has become something of a meeting point for Russian opponents of the Kremlin. The city has taken on the role of a modern Casablanca just 500 miles southwest of Moscow, where members of Russia’s liberal, leftist and nationalist opposition — as well as those seeking to escape a tightly controlled political landscape in Moscow — have congregated in relative safety.</s>The former Russian MP Denis Voronenkov has been shot and killed in Kiev.

Police said an unidentified gunman had shot Voronenkov dead at the entrance of an upmarket hotel in the Ukrainian capital.

Voronenkov, 45, a former member of the Communist faction in the lower house of the Russian parliament, had moved to Ukraine last autumn and had been granted Ukrainian citizenship.

He left Russia with his wife, the singer Maria Maksakova, who was also an MP. He said he had to leave the country because the Russian security agencies were persecuting him, and he renounced his Russian citizenship.

Voronenkov gave a number of interviews after his defection that was sharply critical of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Kremlin policy in Ukraine. However, the decision to grant him citizenship after he had taken part in the parliamentary vote to annex Crimea was strongly criticised in Ukraine.

Voronenkov was on his way to meet Ilya Ponomarev, also a former Russian MP who fled the country, when he was shot, according to Ponomarev.

The Premier Palace hotel is in the very centre of Kiev, and is popular with local businessmen and visiting dignitaries.

Ponomarev wrote on Facebook: “I have no words. The security guard was able to injure the attacker. The potential theory is obvious. Voronenko was not a crook, but an investigator who was fatally dangerous to Russian authorities.”

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, summoned the head of the security services to brief him on the killing. Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, wrote on Facebook that the killing was “the usual kind of Kremlin retribution”.
A former Ukrainian soldier assassinates former Russian Duma deputy Denis Voronenkov in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. In December 2016, he received Ukrainian citizenship. Ilya Ponomarev says Voronenkov was heading to a meeting with him.