A pro-Russian former politician from Ukraine was fatally shot Wednesday morning outside his children’s school in the Spanish capital Madrid, according to the Reuters news agency and multiple Spanish outlets. Andriy Portnov was killed outside the American School of Madrid by an unidentified gunman or gunmen, according to the reports.
“Several persons shot him in the back and the head and then fled toward a forested area,” Reuters quoted an unnamed source at the Spanish Interior Ministry as saying.
There was no immediate confirmation of the slain man’s identity by Spain’s National Police or other authorities, and no indication of a motive or any suspects who might have been identified. Witnesses told Spanish media that at least one possible suspect was seen running into a nearby wooded area.
According to Spain’s El Diario newspaper, citing witnesses, Portnov was shot right after dropping off his children at the American School. Photos from the scene showed a man’s body lying motionless on the ground behind a Mercedes sedan.
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Portnov was a senior aid to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, a pro-Russian leader who was ousted during the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014. That ouster brought Ukraine’s current, Western-backed government to power, and it infuriated Russia, which launched its first, initial invasion of Ukrainian territory that same year, quickly culminating in the unilateral annexation of Crimea.
Portnov was a lawyer, and his political opponents in Ukraine had accused him of helping build a legal framework to enable the former government in Kyiv to crack down on protesters during the 2014 pro-democracy uprising.
Portnov continued living in Ukraine after the 2014 revolution, despite his close ties with the Yanukovich administration, until he left the country in 2022, according to the Radio Freedom Ukraine network.
In 2021, Portnov was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department under the Magnitsky Act, an American law designed to target foreign individuals implicated in corruption and human rights abuses.
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The U.S. government accused him of having “cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine’s judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery,” and said he had been “credibly accused of using his influence to buy access and decisions in Ukraine’s courts and undermining reform efforts.”
“As of 2019, Portnov took steps to control the Ukrainian judiciary, influence associated legislation, sought to place loyal officials in senior judiciary positions, and purchase court decisions,” the Treasury said.
There have been a series of crimes in Spain seemingly related to the Russia-Ukraine war since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Late that same year, a series of letter bomb attacks targeted high-profile institutions including the Ukrainian and U.S. embassies in Madrid and the Spanish Defense Ministry. In early 2024, Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian pilot who had defected to Ukraine, was killed near Alicante, in southeast Spain.