Police arrested a person suspected of pouring acid on Kateryna Gandziuk, a Kherson city council official, Arsen Avakov, the interior minister, announced on his Twitter late on Aug. 3.
Now the police are “collecting evidence that this person was responsible for the crime,” said Vyacheslav Abroskin, first deputy head of the National Police.
Gandziuk was attacked by an unknown man early on July 31, who approached her by the entrance to her parents’ house in Kherson, a southern Ukrainian city about 540 kilometers south of Kyiv, poured some acid on her head and back and ran away.
Gandziuk was hospitalized with severe burns of 30 percent of her body, including her head, back, and eye. Later she was transported by airplane from Kherson to Kyiv.
The police initially qualified attack in as “hooliganism” but later changed it into “murder attempt.”
This brazen attack on an official, who was an outspoken critic of police authorities in Kherson Oblast, outraged many.
Masi Nayyem, a Kyiv-based activist and lawyer, said on Facebook the attack on Gandziuk could be instigated by “local pro-Russian forces like thug Kyryl Stremusov, who is a socialist from the party of Ilya Kiva.” Kiva heads the Interior Ministry’s labor union and is a former advisor of Avakov. Stremusov denied any involvement in the incident.
Ultras of Dynamo Kyiv football team unfolded a banner reading “Who ordered the attack on Katia Gandziuk?” during a game between Dynamo and Shakhtar Donetsk in Kyiv on Aug. 3.
The attack on Gandziuk occurred on the same day when someone shot dead Vitaliy Oleshko, an activist and retired combat veteran of the Donbas war, in the city of Berdyansk in Zaporizhzhia Oblast 700 kilometers southeast from Kyiv.
Oleshko exposed corruption and criticized the local authorities in Berdyansk.
Semen Kabakaev, a military affairs blogger, said Oleshko had conflicts with Oleksandr Ponomarev, a local businessman and lawmaker from the 18-seat People’s Will parliamentary faction.
The police arrested on Aug. 1 four suspects of Oleshko’s murder, all of whom were put under arrest. A judge, who took a decision on the arrest on Aug. 3 announced the main version of the motive of Oleshko’s murder is “conflict related to his business activity.”
One of Oleshko’s suspected murderers is Artem Matiushyn, a former fighter of the volunteer Tornado Battalion. Mykola Zukur, a former deputy company commander with the Tornado Battalion, said that in 2015 Matiushyn had left Tornado had gone to serve in the Azov Regiment, although Azov denied links to Matiushyn.
