Ukraine | A former MP who caused a stir with his comments against the Russian language was assassinated in Ukraine

The former the suspected assassination of a member of parliament has shocked Ukrainians. An armed man is suspected of shooting a former member of parliament of the nationalist Svoboda party by Iryna Farion on Friday, the news agency reported, among other things Reuters.

Farion, 60, was shot outside his home in Lviv, western Ukraine. He died in hospital. The suspected shooter is still being sought.

The motive for the shooting may be related to Farion’s political activities, the Minister of the Interior of Ukraine informed Ihor Klymenko after the event, the message service in Telegram.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyi again wrote on Saturday in Telegram that all possible motives behind the murder are being investigated and that one of them points to Russia.

Iryna Farion was a controversial figure in Ukraine. He was a philologist and spoke loudly for the Ukrainian language.

Farion caused a stir especially with his comments about the use of the Russian language in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians speak Russian as their mother tongue.

Farion served as an MP in 2012–2014. At that time, he strongly criticized his colleagues who did not use the Ukrainian language, he says The Kyiv Independent.

In 2018, according to Reuters, Farion called to “slap every Russian-speaking person on the chin”. The comment was related to Ukraine’s war in the eastern parts of its country against Russian-backed separatists.

The biggest uproar arose in the fall of 2023, when Farion said in an interview that you can’t call Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers Ukrainian. Due to the comments, Farion was fired from his job as a professor of the Ukrainian language at a university in Lviv.

Farion got his professorship back this year.

Many Ukrainians appreciated Farion’s work against the influence of Russia and the Russian language, The Kyiv Independent reports. Others found Farion’s influence methods too polarizing.