Ukraine official pins critic’s death on Russia

MOSCOW — A Ukrainian official said Friday that the killer of renegade Russian lawmaker Denis Voronenkov, who was gunned down in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, was a Russian agent, a claim quickly rejected by the Kremlin.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, identified the man who shot Voronenkov on Thursday as 28-year-old Pavel Parshov and said he had been trained in Russia by Russian security services. Parshov was badly wounded in the attack and died shortly after in a hospital.

“He underwent a special course at a school for saboteurs,” Gerashchenko wrote Friday in a Facebook post without explaining how that information was obtained.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters that Gerashchenko’s allegation was “absurd.”

Ukraine’s National Guard said in a statement that Parshov served in its ranks in 2015-2016 until being dismissed for an unspecified breach of contract.

Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, said Voronenkov was killed shortly before he was scheduled to give testimony later Thursday at Ukraine’s Military Prosecutor’s Office. The purpose of the testimony was not immediately clear.

Voronenkov, who had toed the Kremlin line while serving as Russian lawmaker but turned a Kremlin critic after his move to Ukraine last fall, was shot dead near the entrance to an upscale hotel in the centre of Kyiv.

The slaying has added to the strain in Russia-Ukraine ties that have soured badly following Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and its support for separatist rebels.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko immediately called the killing an “act of state terrorism” by Russia even as Ukrainian police were still inspecting the scene.