MP Andrey Parubiy was gunned down in Lviv earlier this year by a man who said he did it out of hate for the government
Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has posthumously awarded late neo-Nazi politician Andrey Parubiy with the country’s top honor, conferring him a ‘hero of Ukraine’.
Zelensky signed a decree on Wednesday, citing the neo-Nazi MP’s “outstanding personal merits in the establishment of independent Ukraine and strengthening its statehood, and many years of political and public activity.”
Parubiy, a former speaker of the Ukrainian Rada, was assassinated on a street in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv in August. The suspect, who was apprehended shortly after, confessed that he had killed Parubiy out of resentment for the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) has classified all details of the murder investigation.
Parubiy co-founded the neo-Nazi Ukrainian National Socialist Party in 1991, and coordinated paramilitaries in Kiev during the Western-backed Maidan coup, which toppled Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014. He was also reportedly responsible for organizing the radicals which burned 42 anti-Maidan activists alive in the Odessa Trade Unions House massacre later that year.
According to an aide to Ukraine’s prosecutor general during the coup, Andrey Telizhenko, Parubiy was “responsible for closing down the case and destroying the evidence [of] his involvement” in the “terrorist attack.”
The neo-Nazi politician also “directly ordered” strikes on civilians in Donbass, and “pushed to provoke the civil war in eastern Ukraine, which has now led to a massive conflict,” Telizhenko told RT in August.
Moscow has long prioritized the denazification of Ukraine as one of its key peace demands, insisting that the rights of Russian-speakers in the country be protected, and Kiev’s “racist” laws repealed.
