On Dec. 2 Kyiv police arrested two suspects in the killing of a three-year-old boy in downtown Kyiv. According to the police, the suspects are 18 and 19 years old.
The boy, Oleksandr Sobolev, was killed in an assassination attempt that targeted his father, Kyiv Oblast Council lawmaker Vyacheslav Sobolev, on Dec. 1 in central Kyiv.
The attack occurred at approximately 5 p.m. at the crossing of Lva Tolstoho Street and Tarasivska Street in downtown Kyiv, near Mario, a high-end restaurant that Sobolev owns.
One of the attackers fired at Sobolev’s Range Rover from a window of a nearby house, the police said. His son, who was in the backseat of the car, was shot. He died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. Sobolev and his wife weren’t hurt.
Police said they were investigating three possible motives: personal, business, and political.
Sobolev is the father of five children. Oleksandr was his youngest child.
Oleksandr Sobolev, a 3-year-old son of businessman and politician Vyacheslav Sobolev, was murdered in Kyiv on Dec. 1, 2019, when unknown people fired shots at his father’s car. (Facebook/Inna Soboleva)
Who is Vyacheslav Sobolev?
Sobolev has been a member of the Kyiv Oblast Council since 2015 and was elected as a representative of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. He has since turned against the former president, criticizing him on social media.
Sobolev is also a well-known businessman in Donetsk, a city of 1 million people 673 kilometers east of Kyiv that has been occupied by the Russian-led militants since 2014.
In 1997, Sobolev founded Obzhora, Donetsk’s first supermarket chain.
In 2016, Obzhora’s head accountant was arrested by Ukraine’s Security Service on charges of financing terrorism for paying “taxes” to the militants while continue to operate in Russian occupied territory.
Sobolev said that he sold the chain in 2007, and according to his 2018 assets and income declaration he doesn’t own the supermarket chain.
The declaration states Sobolev owns three companies – Galleria Platinum, a high-end furniture seller, Firma Agrar, a wholesale company, and Temp Plus, a company that rents out property.
Before 2016, he officially co-owned DonUkrProektNii. According to Slidstvo.info, a journalistic investigative series, the company is part of an ongoing investigation on charges of financing Russian-led militants in a scheme similar to the one at Obzhora.
The Range Rover Sobolev drove during the assassination attempt is registered with DonUkrProektNii.
Conflicts
Sobolev has a longstanding conflict with Judge Artur Yemelyanov, an influential ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych also from Donetsk. According to the Public Integrity Council, Yemelyanov is a former deputy head of the High Commercial Court and has been charged with issuing unlawful rulings.
In 2016, Sobolev accused Yemelyanov of threatening to kill him over an alleged attempt to take over Sobolev’s property in Mariupol, a city of 450,000 people 750 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
Yemelyanov sued Sobolev for defamation and won the case.
Yemelyanov could not be reached for comment.
