President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says motive is ‘being thoroughly investigated’ after rare street shooting in Kyiv. What we know on day 1,515
Authorities in Ukraine are investigating the possible motives behind Saturday’s mass shooting and hostage-taking in Kyiv, which the SBU Security Service said was a “terrorist act”. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday evening after the shooting in which a gunman killed six people: “All available information about [the attacker] and the motives behind his actions is being thoroughly investigated. Every detail must be verified.” The gunman, 58, opened fire on passersby before barricading himself in a supermarket and taking hostages. Detectives sealed off the area in the Holosiivskyi district and tried to negotiate with him. He refused and was killed after a 40-minute standoff. Local media named the perpetrator as Dmytro Vasylchenkov, a Ukrainian citizen who was born in Moscow. He had previously lived in the Russian city of Ryazan and was a longtime resident of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region. He had a criminal record, Zelenskyy said.
One of the wounded was a 12-year-old boy whose parents were also killed, said Prosecutor Gen Ruslan Kravchenko. Shootings of this nature are extremely rare in Ukraine, whose cities face regular Russian airstrikes. A woman who identified herself as Hanna said the suspect was a neighbour who steered clear of other residents. “He didn’t want to communicate with anyone,” she said. “When I sat outside on the street – he knew me by my face – he would greet me briefly and hurry off to run his errands. He wasn’t close with his neighbours or anyone else.” Lesia Rybzha, 45, said: “I was shocked when I saw photographs of the people who had been killed … I still can’t understand why, on top of [Russians] killing us with airstrikes, people are being killed on the streets as well.”
