The man who fatally shot six people in Ukraine reportedly defended the Holocaust and pogroms on social media
The shooter who killed six people on the streets of Kiev on Saturday and injured more than a dozen others had reportedly ranted on social media about eradicating Jews.
The suspect, identified as Dmitry Vasilchenkov, allegedly fired at bystanders at random before barricading himself inside a grocery store, where he was later killed by police.
According to Ukrainian media, Vasilchenkov was born in Moscow in 1968, but was a Ukrainian national and had served in the Ukrainian army until the early 2000s. He reportedly lived in Russia from 2015 to 2017 before returning to Kiev.
Toronto Television, a Ukrainian news outlet, said the suspect made erratic posts riddled with anti-Semitic slurs on an old Facebook page active from 2016 to 2019. In those posts, he allegedly called for Jews to be “wiped out,” making references to pogroms and the Holocaust.
In a post from October 2017 titled “On Jews and the Jewry,” Vasilchenkov reportedly wrote that the Inquisition, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin “killed and killed, but did not kill enough.”
In another post from February 2019, he reportedly wrote that pro-Russian insurgents in Donbass were “destroying the wrong people” and should instead have targeted “Judeo-criminals and Judeo-cultists,” adding that “the Jews need to be hanged.”
“On what to do – study Pope Borgia (15th century), Kotovsky, Petlyura, Hitler, Bandera, Brezhnev,” he wrote.
Stepan Bandera was one of the leaders of Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, and whose followers were involved in massacres of Jews and Poles. Bandera and some other WWII-era nationalist figures are celebrated in modern Ukraine as heroes and freedom fighters.
Ukrainian media also reported that Vasilchenkov sued the government in 2023 and 2024, demanding an increase in his military pension, and had prior run-ins with the law. TSN released a video allegedly showing him attacking a shopper inside a grocery store in 2023.
