A scene of violence has provoked the anger of Ukrainian citizens, but this time it has nothing to do with the war. A man left his home in Kyiv on April 18 armed with his rifle and, in a 300-meter walk, killed seven people before being shot dead by special forces of the National Police. The news grabbed headlines but did not receive as much attention as the controversy that would arise the following day: videos of testimonies circulated online showed a police patrol that faced the killer and, instead of confronting him, fled in terror, abandoning the first victims.
Not a day has passed since that Saturday, April 18, without the Minister of Internal Affairs, Ihor Klymenko, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself commenting on the negligence of the two officers. How can this happen in a country with hundreds of thousands of people with military experience? This is the question many in Ukraine are asking. The director of the media outlet Censor Net, also a military man, Yuriy Butusov, demanded in an article this Tuesday that all National Police personnel must now have combat experience from the war.
“What happened was a matter of time, with the gradual degradation of the police force, with salaries that have not changed in 10 years and that push officers to the brink of poverty; the smartest ones leave,” wrote former Deputy Minister of Defense Vitaliy Deineha this Tuesday in the media outlet Espreso.
The killer was Dmytro Vasylchenkov, a 58-year-old retired Ukrainian army serviceman. The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has investigated the incident as a terrorist attack. The fact that he was born in Moscow, had lived two years in Russia, that his father was a Russian army officer, and that he had expressed ideas favorable to the Russian invasion on social media indicated, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that the criminal could be following enemy orders.
Sabotage and attacks by Russian collaborators are frequent in Ukraine. But the indications about Vasylchenkov’s origin and ideas are not sufficient: hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were born in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Klymenko downplayed the hypothesis of Russian influence on Monday by revealing that Vasylchenkov had narrated the entire sequence of events to himself with his mobile recorder as if it were a neighborhood dispute. The man was not in his right mind and already had a police record for another fight that occurred in 2023 in a commercial establishment in the neighborhood.
Everything started in the mid-afternoon of April 18 with an argument with a neighbor. Vasylchenkov had lived in the building for 10 years, having moved from Bakhmut, in the Donetsk province. Bakhmut is one of the cities in the Donbas region that have been devastated by the war and have been in Russian hands since 2023. Vasylchenkov had had other disputes with that neighbor, but this time the situation worsened: he shot him with a stun gun.
After confronting other neighbors, Vasylchenkov went down to his apartment, set the dwelling on fire, took a rifle, and went down to the street. At that moment, a police patrol, alerted to a fight, was already heading to the scene. What the two officers, a man and a woman, found left them disoriented, as shown by the video from the camera one of the police officers wore on his vest, which the Prosecutor General, Ruslan Kravchenko, made public on Monday.
“Help my father”
Several members of the Arzubov family were on the street of the incident already with bullet wounds. The police first approached the 11-year-old son, also injured. He appears in the video saying: “Don’t save me, help my father.” These words have made the child a hero in Ukraine. At that moment, Vasylchenkov burst in and shot the child’s aunt, killing her. The female police officer had left the scene seconds before, and the male police officer, hearing the shot, started running, pistol in hand, in the opposite direction, leaving two minors and several adults at the scene. A second shot is heard, finishing off Oleksandr Arzubov, the father. His wife, Lesia, also received shots and is hospitalized with her son.
Read more Real Madrid — Alavés live, the LaLiga match live
The video of a testimony of this scene, taken with a mobile phone from a nearby balcony, spread like wildfire online on Saturday the 18th and caused a political storm. In it, the two police officers are seen disengaging from Vasylchenkov, leaving the Arzubovs alone at the mercy of the killer and the 11-year-old minor lying on the ground.
The Arzubov family was the first victim. Vasylchenkov ran 300 meters, shooting several passersby at point-blank range, killing 4 people and injuring a dozen. This was also filmed by neighbors observing from their homes. Vasylchenkov barricaded himself in a supermarket with hostages. He killed his seventh victim in this business. The police surrounded the establishment and, after 40 minutes of unsuccessful waiting for Vasylchenkov to respond, special forces stormed in and ended his life.
The two police officers have been suspended from their employment and have been brought before the court, investigated for negligence. The head of patrols of the National Police resigned on Monday. “I deeply regret what happened. It repeats in my head every day,” one of the officers, Mykhailo Drobnitskyi, told the judge this Tuesday.
Pressed by Zelenskyy, who sees the matter as a threat to the popularity of his leadership, Klymenko has announced a reform of the entire police hierarchy and the training protocols of the National Police. The government has also initiated a legal reform to increase medical and training tests for gun ownership and, at the same time, to make it easier for civilians to have handguns at home for self-defense.
It is a measure that seems contradictory but attempts to respond to the growing pressure on political power from the media and social networks. The start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 caught millions of Ukrainians by surprise, who armed themselves improvisationally. Even then, the debate arose about the need for the country to have a law that would protect civilians’ right to bear arms for self-defense.
There is no specific law on gun ownership in Ukraine, even though, due to the war, millions of people have access to them. Every week there are reports of armed assaults by civilians. This April 21, for example, a man threw two grenades at the police in a village in the Dnipropetrovsk province. Five officers were injured.
The weekend tragedy in Kyiv has accelerated the creation of a new law, which must be discussed in parliament in the coming weeks. “If police officers are exempt from fighting on the front, at least they must know how to do their job in the rear. And if they cannot, a strong decision will have to be made,” warned MP Yulia Yatsyk, from the Servant of the People parliamentary group, Zelenskyy’s party, in the Ukrainian newspaper Telegraph.
