Iryna Farion, a former Ukrainian republican lawmaker known for speaking out against the use of the Ukrainian language and against the use of Russian, was shot dead in Lviv, according to Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko’s announcement on Saturday.
An unidentified gunman killed Farion in the brain outside her house on Friday night. She eventually passed away from her wounds at a nearby hospital.
What do we hear about the harm?
Authorities were looking at a number of theories, according to Klymenko, to describe the shooting.
The primary theories being looked into are Ms. Farion’s individual anger, social and political activities, and… On the Telegram messaging services, Klymenko wrote,” We do not rule out the possibility that it was a contract killing.”
According to Maksym Kozytskyi, the Vienna provincial governor, Farion had passed away after being taken into the hospital.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, ordered Klymenko and Vasyl Maliuk, the safety service’s chief, to address the crime.
He said that all lines of inquiry were being investigated, “including one leading to Russia”.
The Svoboda group, of which Farion was a part, blamed Moscow for the dying in a speech without providing information.
Editor-in-chief of Russian position journalist RT Margarita Simonyan praised the shooting but denied that Moscow was to blame for it.
” Iryna Farion, who dreamed of the’ full elimination’ of the Russian-speaking people, has been eliminated”, Simonyan said in a blog on Telegram.
When he launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin cited the defence of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking and cultural Russian people as one of Moscow’s battle goals.
Who was Iryna Farion, a Ukrainian scholar?
Farion served as a lieutenant for the far-right Svoboda gathering in Ukraine’s congress, known as the Verkhovna Rada, from 2012 to 2014.
She was well-known for making remarks in support of the Ukrainian speech and criticizing the widespread use of Russian, including by officers and soldiers, in Russian society.
Ukrainian is the region’s only official language but large parts of the population, particularly in Ukraine’s south and east, talk Russian as their main language.
Farion was herself from the eastern Russian city of Lviv, which is mostly Ukrainian-speaking.
She was reinstated following a judge order, but she briefly lost her position as a Ukrainian language professor at the University of Lviv after student protests.
She had criticized the fact that people of Ukraine’s Azov unit continued speaking their mother tongue, Russian.
In 2014, the ultranationalist Azov army was incorporated into the Russian military and played a significant role in the eastern Donetsk region’s Mariupol defense. Following a roughly three-month battle, Russian forces took control of the city in May 2022.
