Page 66 - bne_October 2021_20211004

66 I Eastern Europe bne October 2021
A gunman opened fire on the car of Serhiy Shefir, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, wounding his driver but failing to injure Shefir.
Assassination attempt made against Ukrainian president’s top adviser
Who dunnit?
The attack occurred at 10am, from
a gunman hidden in the woods by
the road, according to investigators. Police said they had no suspects at this time and warned the public against speculating as to the identity of the assassin.
Three possibilities have already been suggested by pundits. Top of the list is Russian security forces, who have a track record of assassinations on foreign soil.
The Kyiv attack comes a day after
the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Russian military secret agents were “probably” behind the assassination of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died an agonising death in 2006 after being poisoned in London with Polonium 210.
On the same day British police said they had identified the “third man” involved in the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 with the Russian military grade nerve agent Novichok. The individual named was Denis Sergeev, a major-general in the GRU that appears to have supervised the failed murder attempt.
Another possibility is Ukrainian mafia groups. Despite years of reforms Ukrainian organised crime retains a powerful grip on the economy and runs multiple rackets, of which cigarette smuggling is one of the biggest. Regular assassinations and murders associated with their business deals are a fact of life
Cameron Jones in London
Serhiy Shefir, the top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was unharmed in
an assassination attempt on the 22 September outside Kyiv.
His car was sprayed with machine-gun fire, but left the aide unharmed. His driver, however, bore the brunt of the attack and was hit by three bullets and left hospitalised in critical condition.
The police released a statement including a picture of the driver’s side of Shefir’s black Audi riddled with bullets. Some have speculated that the would- be assassins were expecting Shefir to
be driving.
“This is serious,” the deputy interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, said in a brief interview. “It was a real assassination attempt.”
The attack occurred while Zelenskiy was in New York for the United Nations
www.bne.eu
General Assembly meeting, where he had said he planned to speak out against Russia’s military intervention in eastern Ukraine and to rally diplomatic backing for Kyiv.
Shefir, 57, is considered Zelenskiy’s closest confidant. Together with his brother and Zelenskiy in 2003, they founded Kvartal
“This is serious,” the deputy interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, said in a brief interview.
“It was a real assassination attempt”
95, a television production company that produced numerous popular shows and propelled Zelenskiy to nationwide fame as a comedian before beginning his political career in 2019. Shefir was a producer on the comedy show “Servant of the People,” in which Zelenskiy played a schoolteacher who later won the presidency.
and the rampant corruption in Ukraine’s law enforcement and security forces has stymied progress at stamping out the problem.
The other likely possibility is a pushback by the oligarchs who have been in the president’s focus since