Assassination attempt on Assistant to the President Serhiy Shefir. Фото: UNIAN
Near the village of Lisnyki in the Kyiv-Sviatoshyn district, at about 10 am, unknown persons fired at the car of Serhiy Shefir, the First Assistant to the President. As a result of the attack, the driver was injured—he suffered three bullet wounds, according to the press service of the National Police. Shefir himself was not injured.
According to preliminary reports of the witnesses, the car was fired at with a submachine gun burst. Law enforcement officials say that more than 10 bullets hit the vehicle.
The police announced an operation Siren to hunt down the intruders.
Relating to the criminal offence committed, the Prosecutor General's Office opened an investigation qualified under article "Intentional Homicide".
The Office of the President called the assassination attempt on Shefir "an attempted defiant murder of a key member of the team." Zelenskyy's Spokesperson Serhiy Nikiforov stated that the President had already been informed about the incident. There would be a public reaction soon, he added.
"The course of the Office of the President for unshadowing and deoligarchisation of Ukraine will not change, and no insidious actions will affect it," Nikiforov wrote.
The head of the Servant of the People faction David Arakhamia said on the sidelines of the Verkhovna Rada that Shefir is now in a state of shock. He believes that he was the target of the attackers, and the driver was accidentally hit.
"About 20 minutes ago I talked to Shefir, he was on his way to work. He usually drives the car himself in 50% of cases, and in 50% of cases his driver does this. It was reported that he was attacked near Lisnyki. The car was fired from automatic weapons, as far as I know now," Arakhamia noted.
He added that many surveillance cameras are installed in the area where the attack took place.
Arakhamia assumed that this attack could be a kind of "greeting" to the "servants of the people." He suggested that this could have been done either by smugglers and crime bosses (who, due to President Zelenskyy's activities, had to leave Ukraine and are ready for revenge), or this was a "Russian trace" (due to the intensification of current anti-Russian rhetoric). He did not rule out that the so-called financial and industrial groups were involved in the incident.
Serhiy Shefir has been working as First Assistant to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since May 25, 2019. He is a founder and director of Studio Kvartal-95.