(Bloomberg) — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for an investigation into the gunshot death of Iryna Farion, a controversial former Ukrainian lawmaker.
Farion was shot on the street in Lviv in far western Ukraine on Friday night and died in hospital hours later.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, who traveled to Lviv after the incident, said personal enmity and the social and political activities of Farion were main motives being looked into.
“Obviously, any violence only deserves to be condemned and everyone who is guilty of this assault has to be held fully responsible,” Zelenskyy said on his Telegram channel.
Farion, 60, was elected to parliament in 2012, during the presidency of Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovych, as a member of the nationalist Svoboda party, which issued a statement on Saturday blaming her killing on Moscow.
She gained notoriety for mocking then-Prime Minister Mykola Azarov at a parliamentary session for his poor command of the Ukrainian language.
Farion also condemned the use of Russian by some Ukrainians in their everyday lives — even though a majority say Ukrainian is their primary language.
In recent years Farion took to YouTube to express her views on language, politics and Ukrainian history.
Her most recent and perhaps most controversial outburst was in November, when she criticized Ukrainian soldiers for speaking Russian when fighting in the war. After that, students of Lviv Polytechnic National University, where Farion taught for over three decades, called for her dismissal.
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