After a 12-hour standoff, Ukrainian law enforcement late on July 21 detained a terrorist who had held 13 people hostage in a bus in Lutsk, a city of 212,000 people located 420 kilometers west of Kyiv.
The hostages are now free. No lives were lost and no hostages were injured, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement.
According to Deputy Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko, the suspect under arrest is a 44-year-old resident of Lutsk named Maksym Kryvosh.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has also claimed that Kryvosh didn’t act alone. According to Avakov, an accomplice was detained in Kharkiv, the city of 1. 4 million located 900 kilometers east of Lutsk. Avakov didn’t specify how many accomplices there were.
The seizure
On the morning of July 21, Kryvosh seized a bus and took its passengers hostage. Besides an automatic weapon, he claimed to have explosives and threatened to bomb the bus.
Kryvosh also told the police that there was an explosive device hidden elsewhere in the city center. He claimed he could detonate it remotely. No device was found.
Kryvosh set several demands for Ukraine’s authorities, such as to replace heads of all major state bodies, law enforcement agencies and religious organizations. He demanded that several top officials declare themselves terrorists, and that Zelensky record a video address recommending the movie “Earthlings,” a 2005 documentary film promoting animal rights.
On the internet, Kryvosh went by the name Maksym Plokhoy (“plokhoy” means “bad” in Russian). On the morning of July 21, he posted a message on Twitter celebrating “anti-system day.” During the day, Kryvosh kept publishing posts on Twitter until the account was suspended.
The release
Around 9 p.m., Zelensky gave into one of the demands. He recorded and published a video on his Facebook account stating: “Everyone should watch the film ‘Earthlings’ from 2005.”
According to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff, the video was the result of a direct phone conversation between the Ukrainian president and Kryvosh. During the conversation, Kryvosh agreed to release three of the hostages immediately and the rest after Zelensky recorded a video endorsing “Earthlings.”
After Kryvosh followed through with his first promise, Zelensky decided to record and publish the video, according to Tymoshenko. After the hostages were freed, the president deleted the video.
At a press conference after Kryvosh was arrested, Avakov spoke positively of “Earthlings,” seemingly to defend Zelensky for giving into the odd demand.
“It’s a good movie,” Avakov said. “You don’t have to take hostages to force people to watch it.”
About the attacker
According to Gerashchenko, Kryvosh served two sentences in prison. In 1994, he was convicted of ransom and robbery. In 2005, he served time for racketeering.
On his social media, Kryvosh said that he had written a book called “Philosophy of the Criminal,” which he reportedly self-published in 2014. According to Gerashchenko, the book recounted Kryvosh’s experiences in prison.
He also expressed broad criticism of virtually all Ukrainian politicians.
Avakov called Kryvosh “an unstable man who made up a world of his own.”
