Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on July 25 that a suspect in the shooting death of former lawmaker Iryna Farion, who was known for campaigns promoting the Ukrainian language, was detained in the eastern city of Dnipro.
Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram that Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko had informed him of the detention of an 18-year-old man suspected in the July 19 shooting.
"The operation to detain the suspect was very complicated. Hundreds of specialists from the National Police of Ukraine, the SBU, and other services worked on solving the murder, all these days," Zelenskiy wrote, adding that he asked Klymenko to provide the public with all of the details of the investigation in the high-profile case.
Klymenko said shortly afterward in a statement that the suspect rented at least three apartments in Lviv while preparing the attack on Farion.
"Now the suspect is in custody. It is important to obtain all the details. At this point, investigators are inclined to think that the shooter is just the one who carried out the attack," Klymenko said, adding that any follow-up information will be made public later.
The Schemes (Skhemy) investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service was able to identify the suspect but decided not to disclose the information.
The suspect's father told RFE/RL that his son could not have had any motive to kill Farion.
"I am currently on the battlefield and have not seen my son for some time. I talked to him on the phone on a regular basis," the man said, adding that his son is a graduate of a high school in Dnipro.
"He passed courses on using drones so that he could join Ukrainian troops. He played soccer," said the suspect’s father, whose identity Schemes also decided not to reveal.
RFE/RL also interviewed residents in Dnipro, including one woman who described the suspect as a “very good boy.” The woman, who spoke anonymously, said she had difficulty believing the teenager could have been the killer.
The young man had a "healthy lifestyle," reads a lot, and was studying to be a journalist, she told RFE/RL.
Schemes confirmed through other sources that the suspect is a graduate of a high school in Dnipro. As a soccer player with the city's youth soccer club, he participated in a soccer tournament in autumn 2022 to support Ukraine's armed forces.
The 60-year-old Farion was shot in the head on a street in Ukraine's western city of Lviv and died in a hospital hours later.
Farion, a linguist, became a member of the nationalist Svoboda party in 2005 and was elected to parliament in 2012 but failed in subsequent attempts to win reelection.
She gained notoriety for frequent campaigns to promote the Ukrainian language and discredit public officials who spoke Russian.
Farion’s views were seen as radical by some critics, and some of her statements sparked controversy.
In 2018, when Ukraine was fighting Russia-backed separatists who had seized territory in the east, she called for a drive to "punch every Russian-speaking person in the jaw."
In 2023, she was dismissed as a professor at the Department of Ukrainian Language at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lviv Polytechnic University due to her controversial statements.
At the end of May, the Lviv Court of Appeal issued a ruling reinstating her to the position.