Ukraine’s secret services have reached the center of Russia. A former deputy of the Rada (Ukrainian Parliament), Ilyá Kiva, was found dead this Wednesday near Moscow, murdered by a shot to the head. Several military sources in Kyiv claimed responsibility for the attack for Ukraine. “Other traitors to Ukraine will suffer the same fate,” said Andriy Yusov, spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR).
The body of the Ukrainian politician was found around three in the afternoon in the park of the Velich Country Club hotel, located in the town of Suponevo, in the Odintsovo region southwest of Moscow, according to the Shot and Mash channels on Telegram. He had a wound on his right temple.
Before Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2022, Kiva was a pro-Russian deputy in the Kyiv Rada. After the start of the invasion, he moved to Russia, from where he has criticized the Ukrainian authorities.
Ukrainian military sources yesterday told several agencies in Kyiv, including Afp and Unian, that the attack on Kiva had been organized by the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU).
GUR spokesman Andriy Yusov declared on Ukrainian television that the former deputy was “finished.” He was not specific about who was responsible for the murder, but he stated: “Other traitors in Ukraine will suffer the same fate. We can only confirm that justice takes different forms.”
Iliá Kiva was born in 1977 in Poltava (central Ukraine). In 2014, during the pro-European Maidan revolution, he was a supporter of the Right Sector. He was opposed to the then pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, as he explained a year ago in an interview with the newspaper Argumenti y Fakti. But, according to him, the power that replaced him “was completely supervised by the American embassy.”
Over time, Iliá Kiva changed his political point of view. In 2017 he led the Socialist Party of Ukraine and two years later he ran in the presidential elections, which the current Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, won. Kiva received 0.03% of the vote.
Since 2019 he was a deputy in the Rada for the Opposition Platform-For Life formation, considered pro-Russian. In March 2022, after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Zelensky ordered a ban on the two political parties cited for their ties to Russia.
Kiva was stripped of his mandate as a deputy following several statements, including that “the Ukrainian people must be liberated” and that “Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians are one people.” He also assured that “the war is lost” and called on Zelensky to resign.
Last March, a trial for treason was initiated against him. In April he accused Kyiv authorities of wanting to kill him and, according to the RBK newspaper, announced plans to request political asylum in Russia.
On November 13, a Lviv court sentenced Ilya Kiva in absentia to 14 years in prison for the crime of treason, for calling for the overthrow of the constitutional order in Ukraine and for the use of communist symbols.
Another former Ukrainian deputy, Oleg Tsariov, suffered an assassination attempt at the end of October in Crimea. Moscow accused Kyiv of being behind it.
The Russian authorities also accuse the Ukrainian secret services of several attacks that occurred in Russian territory after February 2022. Among them, those that caused the death of the journalist Daria Dugina, daughter of the Russian nationalist philosopher and ideologist Alexander Dugin, in August 2022, in the Moscow region; and that of military blogger Vladlén Tatarski, in April 2023, in Saint Petersburg.
