Alex Trelinski
A MAN who worked for a former Ukrainian president has been shot and killed in Madrid.
Solicitor and former politician Andriy Portnov, 52, was assassinated on Wednesday outside the gates of the American School of Madrid in the city’s affluent Pozuelo de Alarcon area.
The Policia Nacional said he dropped off his children at around 9.15am and was then shot five times.
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The fatal bullet was in Portnov’s head.
Initially reports suggested there had been up to three perpetrators who waited for him in his Mercedes car.
One report said police were looking for a tall man who ran off towards Casa de Campo.
Portnov was a former adviser to former ex-president Viktor Yanukovych and had been investigated for corruption.
He was very much pro-Russian and lived there after the Yanukovych government was ousted in 2014.
He then moved to Vienna where he worked as a lawyer, before making a return to Ukraine in 2019.
In 2018, the Crimean prosecutors office opened an investigation into Portnov for his alleged involvement in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The same year, Ukraine’s security service started criminal action against him in regard to treason.
According to Portnoy, both cases were dropped.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there have been several crimes involving Russians and Ukrainians in Spain with large expat groupings from both countries.
In November and December 2022, six letter bombs were sent to targets around Spain, including Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and the Ukrainian Embassy in Madrid.
A 76-year-old retired civil servant who sympathised with Russia was subsequently jailed.
