On Wednesday morning, an unidentified gunman shot and killed a Ukrainian former politician outside a school in a wealthy suburb of Madrid, Spain’s Interior Ministry said.
According to Madrid police, the police received a call about the shooting of a Ukrainian citizen at 9:15 a.m. (0715 GMT) local time outside the elite America school of Madrid, located in Pozuelo de Alarcon.
“Several persons shot him in the back and the head and then fled towards a forested area,” an Interior Ministry source said.
Andriy Portnov, 51, was a top aide to Ukraine’s pro-Russian former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was deposed in a 2014 popular rebellion.
Portnov left for Russia the same year and has been investigated in Ukraine on charges of treason and embezzlement, as well as international penalties, though the charges and EU sanctions were ultimately dismissed.
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In 2021, the US Treasury Department placed Portnov on its sanctions list, claiming that he had “cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine’s judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery”.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there have been several high-profile crimes involving Russians and Ukrainians in Spain, which has a large expatriate community from both countries.
In 2022, six letter bombs were addressed to targets in Spain, including Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the Ukrainian and US embassies, and government institutions.
A retired Spanish public servant whose social media searches indicated support for Russia was imprisoned for the crimes. In February 2024, a Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine was discovered dead from multiple gunshot wounds in the parking garage of his apartment building near Alicante.
