Poroshenko Bloc faction leader: High-profile killings in Kyiv hurt Ukraine's image
Yuriy Lutsenko, leader of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction in Ukraine's parliament, believes the high-profile killings in Kyiv hurt the country's image.
The politician said on Facebook on Friday that the Kremlin may be behind the killings of pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.
Lutsenko said these killings are aimed at causing division between Ukraine and its friends in the West.
"Now is a dangerous time of the exacerbation of the imperial megalomania […] The issue if 'martyrs' giving their 'lives for the Tsar' ideally fits the Russian Orthodox fundamentalism and chauvinism cultivated in the past few years. Simultaneously, these killings hurt the image of Ukraine and cause division between Ukrainians and their friends in the West," Lutsenko said.
Oleh Kalashnikov, former Ukrainian parliamentarian (Party of Regions faction) was shot and killed on the threshold of his apartment in Kyiv in the evening of April 15.
Serhiy Suhobok, a co-founder of the Internet publications ProUA and Obkom, was killed in a conflict with his neighbors on April 16. The journalist's neighbors have been detained by police.
Oles Buzyna, the journalist who had recently left the post of editor of the newspaper Segodnya was killed near his apartment building in Kyiv on April 16. The assassins fired the shots from a blue Ford Focus with a foreign number plate.