Yet another former official in the government of Viktor Yanukovvch, the pro-Russia political leader who served as Ukraine’s elected president from 2010 until his ouster in Western-backed demonstrations in 2014, has been assassinated. On May 21, 2025, multiple gunmen shot Andriy Portnov, who had been a senior aide to Yanukovych, outside his children’s school near the Spanish capital, Madrid, after Portnov had dropped off his children. According to Spanish authorities, the assailants shot him several times before escaping into nearby woods. The incident had all the earmarks of a professional hit, and the current Ukrainian government led by President Volodymyr Zelensky is the principal suspect.
Since Yanukovych’s 2014 ouster, a growing number of his appointees or vocal supporters have vanished under mysterious circumstances, died in questionable accidents, allegedly committed suicide, or (like Portnov), were victims of brazen political murders. Portnoy, as did many other senior Yanukovych aides, fled Ukraine immediately after the president’s fall. He returned to Ukraine in 2019, despite the danger, but fled again in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Predictably, the pro-government press in Ukraine and its allies in the West portray Portnov as little more than a corrupt, pro-Russia stooge. However, his political orientation seemed more nuanced and complex than that. Indeed, before he joined the Yanukovych camp in 2010, he was a supporter of rival Yulia Tymoshenko, a prominent political darling of U.S. and European governments who pushed for extensive economic, political, and military ties between Kyiv and the West and touted various reforms in Ukraine. Politically and ideologically, Portnov always has seemed to be a rather elusive figure to categorize – despite a concerted campaign to demonize him in both the Western news media and what is left of the Ukraine press.
He continued to occupy a precarious but potentially influential status, especially if Kyiv’s NATO sponsors sought to exit the quagmire of their proxy war against Russia and needed a reasonably credible compromise replacement for Zelensky as Ukraine’s president. Elements within the Zelensky administration had good reason to view Portnov as a potential threat to the incumbent.
Even though NATO leaders invariably portray the Zelensky government as a democratic model, the record proves the opposite. Under Zelensky’s rule, Ukraine has outlawed opposition parties, muzzled the press, harassed uncooperative churches, amassed a record of arbitrary imprisonment and torture, and postponed elections indefinitely. It is involved in a perpetual power struggle within an increasingly ruthless authoritarian political system.
Moreover, allegedly pro-Western, democratic elements in Ukraine’s governing elite are not averse to engaging in “wet work,” the euphemism used to describe the violent elimination of political adversaries. A September 2023 article in the Economist confirmed the possible extent of that tactic, describing Kyiv’s systematic assassination program in considerable detail. Targets “have been shot, blown up, hanged and even, on occasion, poisoned with doctored brandy. Ukraine is tight-lipped about its involvement in assassinations. But few doubt the increasingly competent signature of its security services. The agencies themselves drop heavy hints.” Moreover, such behavior did not begin as a response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. “Assassinations date back to at least 2015, when its domestic security service (SBU) created a new body after Russia had seized Crimea and the eastern Donbas region. The elite fifth counter-intelligence directorate started life as a saboteur force in response to the invasion. It later came to focus on what is euphemistically called ‘wet work’.”
Such behavior apparently began during the presidency of Petro Poroshenko (another U.S. client that Washington portrayed as a democratic stalwart), but it has become more frequent and brazen under Zelensky. Moreover, it needs to be emphasized that the targets of assassinations receive no due process whatsoever. Government authorities arbitrarily decide that they are traitors and proceed to execute them without a trial. That is an outrageous way for a supposed democracy to behave, but it seems to be the norm in Zelensky’s “democratic” Ukraine.
Portnov’s assassination also seems to fit the pattern described in the Economist very closely. It was a sophisticated, carefully coordinated assault by multiple, capable operatives, not some amateur shootout waged by angry ideological opponents. Western policymakers should at a minimum conduct their own investigation of the episode. Perhaps U.S. and NATO officials are content even if their “democratic” client engages in murderous conduct, but they at least must be realistic and forthright about the way politics is practiced in today’s Ukraine.
Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a contributing editor to 19FortyFive and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute. He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
