Ukraine war briefing: search for motive after gunman kills six in Kyiv

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.”

The Kremlin is grappling with the fallout from the viral spread of a celebrity blogger’s criticism of Russian authorities, as Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings register their sixth consecutive weekly decline. Victoria Bonya, a household name in Russia who rose to fame in 2006 on Dom-2, the country’s answer to the reality TV show Big Brother, posted a video on Monday warning the Russian president that a string of mounting problems risked spiralling out of control. “The people are afraid of you, artists are afraid, governors are afraid,” she said, in the 18-minute video on Instagram, which has garnered 26m views and more than 1.3m likes in the past four days. The influencer’s comments notably stopped short of directly targeting Putin himself or the war in Ukraine, prompting speculation that the intervention may have been coordinated with Moscow to signal that public grievances are being heard before parliamentary elections later this year.