A high-profile crime, in which there is hardly any political connotation, occurred in Spain. Andrei Portnov was apparently the victim of a contract killing. The deputy Head of the presidential administration during the events on the Maidan in late 2013 and early 2014, he was the only associate of Viktor Yanukovych, who through the court managed to completely lift the sanctions of the European Union.
Portnov was killed in a prestigious suburb of Madrid, Pozuelo de Alarcon. The criminals ambushed him at the American school building, where the 52-year-old politician was taking his daughter. Police say Portnov was wounded four times, three in the chest and one in the head. The killers (there may have been several of them) fled to a nearby forest area. The police do not put forward any versions of what happened, unlike politicians, both Russian and Ukrainian.
After all, Portnov’s biography opens up scope for various interpretations of the reasons that could have led to his murder.
In short, the tortuous life path of this man, about whom more than one book can be written, is as follows. A native of Luhansk, a lawyer by training, he became known as a public politician in 2006, when he joined the Verkhovna Rada on the list of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT). Later, he became the deputy head of the faction and a very prominent and rather independent member of it. At that time, there was even the term “Portnov’s group”, which referred to his supporters, who were initially completely loyal to Yulia Tymoshenko, and then clashed with her. Portnov and Tymoshenko finally parted ways in 2010. After the presidential elections that brought Yanukovych to power, he sided with him. In the team of the then Ukrainian president, Portnov was involved in the judicial and legal sphere and in this capacity became a very prominent, but for the most part, a behind-the-scenes figure in Ukrainian politics. At the height of the events on the Maidan, on January 24, 2014, Yanukovych appointed him first deputy head of the presidential administration. He held this post for about a month, which was marked by the most dramatic events: the change of power in Kiev and the annexation of Crimea to the Russian Federation.
After that, Portnov left, but not to Russia, like Yanukovych, but to the West. In 2015, he managed to win a case in the European Court of Justice and achieve the lifting of EU sanctions. Later, he twice fought off attempts to impose sanctions on him. Portnov won in the courts against the European Union and Canada. In 2021, US sanctions were also imposed against him. Perhaps he would have won in court against the United States, too. In 2019, when Vladimir Zelensky came to power, Portnov unexpectedly returned to Kiev, stayed there for some time and then left for Spain, where he remained until his death.
The publication El Pais claims that Portnov had Russian citizenship. He himself, however, never talked about it. His Telegram, abandoned in February 2022, is full of accusations against various Ukrainian politicians, especially Petro Poroshenko, who is included in the list of extremists and terrorists in the Russian Federation.