Police are on the hunt for whoever tried to kill Serhiy Shefir, a close friend and adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the morning of Sept. 22.
Shefir’s car was struck by a volley of automatic gunfire while driving along a forested stretch of road near Lesnyky village outside of Kyiv. Shefir escaped unscathed, but his driver was injured and hospitalized.
It was the most brazen attack on the highest-profile Ukrainian political figure in over a decade.
Zelensky and his administration were blindsided by the shooting. “Who is behind this, frankly, I do not know,” Zelensky said on Sept. 23 from New York, where he was attending the United Nations General Assembly. He did not rule out the participation of a foreign actor.
Zelensky’s Servant of the People Faction Head David Arakhamia said that Russia could be behind the attack, something the Kremlin denied.
Zelensky said that trying to get his attention by shooting his friend’s car is “weak” and promised a “strong response.”
The attack came a day before the parliament passed the president’s anti-oligarch bill in the final reading. Some of Zelensky’s advisers suggested that the two events could be connected.
Speaking after the shooting, Shefir said he believes the attack was meant to rattle his boss.
“In my opinion, the goal was to intimidate the highest echelons of power but Zelensky cannot be intimidated,” he said.
Police report
According to Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, Shefir was ambushed while his car was passing two villages outside Kyiv. Shefir was the sole passenger of an unarmored black Audi belonging to the TV production company Kvartal 95.
Serhiy Shefir, his brother Borys and Zelensky co-founded Kvartal 95, which laid the path to Zelensky’s stardom and eventually, his presidency.
At around 10:20 a.m., a burst of gunfire erupted from the nearby woods. The car was struck by at least 12 bullets. Three bullets hit the driver but Shefir managed to duck and avoid injury. In spite of his wound, the driver hit the gas and sped five kilometers to the parking lot of a nearby supermarket, where Shefir called for an ambulance and summoned the police.
“The gunfire was intended to stop the car. If it stopped after 50 or 100 meters, the consequences would have been unequivocally tragic,” Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky said during a joint press briefing with Shefir hours after the attack.
Monastyrsky believes the purpose of the crime was “not to scare but to kill.”
There were no cameras at the scene and the road is lined by woods, which provided good cover for the perpetrators, Venediktova said. This made it harder to track down the would-be killer.
The police are currently investigating three possible motives for the attack. It could have been a response to Shefir’s government work, an attempt to pressure Ukraine’s top leaders or destabilize the situation in the country.
Who is Shefir?
Shefir, 57, is one of the president’s closest associates.
After Zelensky’s victory in 2019, the president handed over his share in Kvartal 95 and eight entertainment companies to his business partners, including Shefir.
Shefir said his main job as adviser is to follow the president’s orders.
“I have to be there and make sure that Zelensky stays a man after becoming a politician, because very often, when one holds a prominent position, he starts to be surrounded by people only praising him and then leading him in the wrong direction,” Shefir once explained.
He is also known to be Zelensky’s point man for communicating with Ukraine’s oligarchs.
A photo released on Sept. 22, 2021 by the Ukrainian National Police shows the bullet impact on the car of Serhiy Shefir, a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky. (Anton Gerashchenko/Facebook)
The Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Schemes investigation series showed that Shefir attended the birthday party of notorious businessman Ihor Surkis in August 2020. Later that month, journalists from Schemes filmed Shefir visiting the house of oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, owner of DTEK energy company.
Shefir didn’t confirm his meeting with Akhmetov.
“Shefir is the most private and least controversial among those close to the president.
It is a well-known fact that he communicates with representatives of various forces, but he usually works on resolving conflicts. He is the so-called ‘dove of peace,’ Fesenko told the Kyiv Post.
Oligarch revenge?
Mykhailo Podolyak, a communications adviser to Zelensky’s chief of staff, said that the attempt to assassinate Shefir could have resulted from the president’s recent attempt to crack down on oligarchs.
In June, Zelensky submitted the so-called “deoligarchization bill” to parliament in an attempt to curtail the influence of the country’s wealthy elite. On Sept. 23, the parliament passed the bill in the final reading. It creates a legal definition of what an oligarch is, restricts their contact with public officials and bans them from buying privatized state assets.
However, some political experts are skeptical that the assassination attempt was linked to this bill.
“To say that Shefir was the target to disrupt the vote on the deoligarchization bill, especially since this situation only improves the chances of its adoption, is a speculation,” Oleh Saakian, a political expert, told the Kyiv Post. “It looks even more cynical considering that Shefir was one of those members of Zelensky’s team who opposed the law.”
Political expert Volodymyr Fesenko, who is close to the government, said that representatives of big businesses or oligarchs are unlikely to want to remove Shefir. On the contrary, they need him to communicate with Zelensky.
“The big oligarchs are unlikely to take such a step. They tend to negotiate with the president, and not fight this way,” Fesenko said. “Moreover, I believe that if this was related to the deoligarchization law, the target should have been Oleksiy Danilov (head of the National Security and Defense Council), as Shefir wasn’t a supporter of the law,” Fesenko said.
In his statement, Zelensky said he believes the attack was a message addressed to him personally.
“Here is the price of change in the state, here is the price of reforms,” Zelensky said during his address to the United Nations General Assembly.
Fesenko believes that this will strongly affect Zelensky.
“Zelensky was always emotional,” the expert said. “His behavior can change: He can become tougher, put less trust in some people. We have seen that he can act harshly with the example of sanctions against (pro-Kremlin lawmaker) Viktor Medvedchuk.”
