At least six people are dead and 15 others have been injured after a man opened fire on civilians in a street in Kyiv on Saturday before taking hostages in a supermarket, Ukrainian authorities said.
The shooter, who was identified by Ukraine’s Attorney General Ruslan Kravchenko as a 58-year-old man born in Moscow, is also dead.
Authorities are working to establish the circumstances of the crime, as well as the motives behind it, which they are investigating as a “terrorist act”, Kravchenko said.
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Kravchenko said the man opened fire on a street in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district, killing four people, before barricading himself inside a supermarket, where he killed another person and took hostages.
According to preliminary reports, the shooter used an automatic weapon, that was a registered firearm, Kravchenko said.
Another person shot by the attacker died in the hospital, according to Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko, who said nine more people were being treated in hospitals and six others were treated by medics on site.
Speaking after the incident a police hostage negotiator, Valeriia, told Reuters:
“We arrived following a call and learned that an armed man was inside the Velmart supermarket. A special operation was launched, during which I spoke with him for 40 minutes. He made no contact during 40 minutes,” she said.
Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko said after 40 minutes had passed and the shooter had failed to respond, special forces from the National Police’s Rapid Response Unit stormed the store. The gunman fired shots at the police officers during his attempted arrest and was killed, Klymenko said.
“He acted chaotically. He approached every person… he was simply shooting people point-blank,” he said.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said four people who were being held hostage by the shooter inside the supermarket had been rescued.
Zelensky said investigators are currently trying to determine everything that can be known about him and why he committed these acts. “Every detail must be examined, investigators are working with several theories,” he said.
Zelensky said the gunman had lived in Ukraine’s Donetsk region “for a long time” and had a criminal record.
Kravchenko said that the apartment where the shooter was registered as living was set on fire around the same time as the attack.
Mass shootings are rare in Ukraine, despite the huge number of weapons held by its citizens. There has been no such incident since the start of the full-scale war in 2022, and only a handful in the country’s post-independence history.
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