Ukrainian activist Ivan Bubenchik, a self-proclaimed EuroMaidan sniper and Donbas war veteran, was released by Pechersk District Court on April 5 after he was arrested on suspicion of killing two police officers on the bloodiest day of the EuroMaidan Revolution on Feb. 20, 2014.
Bubenchik has to arrive at the General Prosecutor’s Office at 5 p.m. April 5 where he would be given a different notice of suspicion, Anzhela Struzhevska, deputy prosecutor general, said in the courtroom after the hearing.
He was detained earlier on the Ukrainian-Polish border as he wanted to go to Poland for half a day, according to him.
A number of Ukrainian lawmakers, including Volodymyr Parasiuk, Semen Semenchenko and Yehor Sobolev said they are ready to vouch for Bubenchik.
In 2016, Bubenchik, a native of western Ukraine’s Lviv, claimed in a documentary film called “Brantsi” (Captives) from director Volodymyr Tyhyi, that he had killed two police officers from the Kyiv Conservatory building that was facing Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square.
The Maidan protests were on the brink of being crushed by the security forces on the night of Feb. 19, 2014. The Trade Union House, which had served as a basecamp for the protesters, had been set ablaze by police the previous night. Protesters broke into the Kyiv Conservatory on the edge of Independence Square, called Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Ukrainian, and took refuge there.
It was from there that Bubenchik says he shot two riot police commanders. He said that on the morning of Feb. 20, 2014, with the security forces massing for a final assault on the Maidan protest camp, a young man appeared with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and 75 bullets hidden in a tennis bag.
Bubenchik said it was then that he decided to act. He said Berkut officers had already been shooting at activists behind the barricades on the Maidan.
He took the weapon, and went to a firing position at a third floor window in the Conservatory, at the end of the colonnade in front of the third and fourth floors of the building furthest from the Maidan. From there, he had a clear shot at police officers hiding behind sandbags at the foot of Independence Monument on Maidan Nezalezhnosti.
Bubenchik said he shot two Berkut commanders, killing them.
“It turned out that they (the police officers) stood with their backs turned to me. I did not have the opportunity to wait until they turned around. So God ruled, so it was done,” Bubenchik was quoted as saying in the interview recorded in Ukrainian and published on Feb. 19, 2016 on the Bird In Flight website.
He then opened fire on the legs of other Berkut officers, wounding several and causing them to flee from their positions. As the police withdrew, Maidan protesters surged forward, and then came under fire from police snipers on Instytutska Street.
Bubenchik said he used to serve in the Soviet Armed Forces, and that he also completed training in a military intelligence school. After the war erupted in eastern Ukraine, he served in the volunteer Dnipro 1 Battalion.
He said he regretted that he didn’t have enough bullets to fire at police snipers when the shootings on Instytutska Street started. He said that if he had, he could have saved the lives of many of the protesters shot by police snipers there.
In February 2016, the Prosecutor General’s Office conducted an investigation into a statement by Bubenchik that he killed two Berkut police officers early in the morning of Feb. 20, 2014. He was called to testify as a witness in the case in 2016 but he didn’t show up for the hearings, the prosecutors claimed. According to the investigators, four police officers were killed on Feb. 20, 2014.
Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer for the families of Heavenly Hundred, is cautious about Bubenchik’s claims.
“I have been speaking publicly for 3-4 years that the start of the shootings (on Feb. 20) was provocative and deliberate and completely absurd in terms of the purpose that was declared by Bubenchik. Therefore, this should be carefully investigated,” Tytych said.
