ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON LEADER'S TOP AIDE FAILS

Ukrainian police are trying to work out who ordered unidentified individuals to try to murder a top aide of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after his car was sprayed with automatic gunfire on Wednesday morning in an attack that shocked the political elite.

Serhiy Shefir, the top aide and a close personal friend of Zelenskiy's, escaped unscathed, but his driver was badly wounded and hospitalized.

The black Audi carrying Shefir was pockmarked with at least 10 bullet holes. Irina Venediktova, Ukraine's prosecutor general, said the car had been ambushed as it drove between two villages outside Kyiv, the capital.

The road is lined on both sides by forest which would have given the shooters good cover to hide and get away.

Police said in a statement they had opened a criminal case on suspicion of attempted murder and saw three possible motives and versions: an effort to pressure the country's leadership, an attempt to destabilize the political situation, or an attack engineered by a foreign intelligence service.

“The purpose of this crime was not to scare, but to kill,” Denys Monastyrsky, the interior minister, said.

Some of Zelenskiy's advisers suggested the attack may have been orchestrated by a disgruntled oligarch or oligarchs fed up with a presidential drive to dilute their influence. Other advisers raised the possibility that Russia may have been behind the shooting, something the Kremlin denied.

Zelenskiy, who was in New York for the UN General Assembly, said he did not know who was responsible for the attack, but pledged “a strong response.”