On May 21, 2025, Andrij Portnov was assassinated with five gunshots in the Pozuelo de Alarcón district of Madrid, Spain.

Andrij Portnov had been a prominent figure in the top echelons of the Ukrainian legal system since 2005, when he led the legal department of Yulia Tymoshenko’s presidential campaign.

Under Viktor Yanukovych, he headed the legal department of his presidential administration and in 2014, during the Maidan protests, became deputy head of Yanukovych’s presidential administration. He was involved in creating laws against the Maidan demonstrators. After Yanukovych’s regime was defeated, he fled to Russia and later, when the EU lifted sanctions against him in 2015 that had been imposed in 2014, he moved to Vienna where he practiced law.

In 2019, after all Ukrainian legal proceedings against him were terminated at the request of his lawyer, he returned to Ukraine. In the Ukrainian presidential elections, he supported Volodymyr Zelensky, which apparently paved the way for his “private business ventures.“ In 2021, the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on Andrij Portnov for corrupt activities within the Ukrainian judiciary. It stated:

“Portnov, a former lawmaker and deputy head of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration, has cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine’s judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery. Widely known as a court fixer, Portnov was credibly accused of using his influence to buy access and decisions in Ukraine’s courts and undermining reform efforts. As of 2019, Portnov took steps to control the Ukrainian judiciary, influence associated legislation, sought to place loyal officials in senior judiciary positions, and purchase court decisions. Portnov colluded in 2019 with a high-ranking Ukrainian government official to shape the country’s higher legal institutions to their advantage and influence Ukraine’s Constitutional Court, Portnov also has been involved in an attempt to influence the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General.”

Since June 2022, Portnov lived in Spain, but even from there he influenced developments in the Ukrainian judiciary. In an article about his murder, the newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda wrote: “Defeating Portnov in court is impossible.” It stated that a number of Ukrainian judges held their positions thanks to him, and that the Ukrainian National Association of Judges persisted from the Yanukovych era. According to a Ukrayinska Pravda source, Portnov provided services that could be characterized as “turnkey criminal prosecution.”

Before his murder, he was involved in organizing court proceedings against former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been trying for years to get rid of Petro Poroshenko as a potential successful competitor for the presidency in the next election by accusing him of treason. For example, on March 15, 2025, at 3 a.m., Kyiv court ordered the arrest of Vadym Chukovsky, the deputy head of former President Poroshenko’s security service. He was expected to testify against Poroshenko that in late March 2019, before the Ukrainian presidential election, he went to the airport to meet a plane carrying election money from Moscow for Poroshenko and accepted it. The evidence was to be a previously undisclosed video filmed by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), handed over to investigators by Viktor Medvedchuk’s advisor Taras Kozak. Poroshenko’s lawyer Ilya Novikov accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy in front of journalists of fabricating evidence against Petro Poroshenko to eliminate him as an election rival.

The indictments against Petro Poroshenko were not based on very strong arguments. Two days after Portnov’s murder, Ukrayinska Pravda learned from an unnamed source that shortly before the murder (May 17–18, 2025), Portnov was in Ukraine and met there with high-ranking Ukrainian government officials responsible for the judiciary – with Oleg Tatarov, deputy director of Zelenskyy’s Office of the President, and Alexei Sukhachev, director of Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation. The newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda obtained this information from four independent sources. According to information from Ukrayinska Pravda, Alexei Sukhachev, director of the State Investigation Bureau, oversaw the investigation into Poroshenko’s purchase of coal in the rebel-held regions of Ukraine, but only in name; in reality, it was led from the outset by Portnov, who was eager to take personal revenge on Poroshenko for broken promises and political animosity. This information suggested that Zelenskyy’s presidential office was also involved in the lawsuit against Poroshenko.

On the same day that Portnov was murdered, an article was published stating that another investigation had been launched against Petro Poroshenko to determine whether, as foreign minister in Yushchenko’s Ukrainian government, he had participated in drafting the so-called Kharkiv Agreements, under which Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was granted a permit to remain in Crimea until 2042. The report did not specify what he might be charged with. According to another report, he was to be charged both for this matter and, in addition, with treason for having, as president of Ukraine—at a time when Ukraine was suffering from a coal shortage and during the civil war between western and eastern Ukraine—imported coal into Ukraine from the rebel-held regions in eastern Ukraine. This article was published on the same day that Portnov was murdered, May 21, 2025.

In addition to high-ranking government officials, Andriy Portnov, during his visit to Ukraine on May 17 and 18 May 2025, also met with another éminence grise of Ukrainian politics, Timur Mindich, who fled Ukraine roughly a year later, just a few hours before his apartment was to be searched in connection with a large-scale anti-corruption investigation that uncovered embezzlement amounting to hundreds of millions of hrivnias in the awarding of contracts by the state-owned company Energoatom.

This accusation was preceded by charges of embezzlement of 1.2 billion hryvnias brought against Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshev, a friend of Mindich and Zelenskyy. A search of Chernyshev’s apartment took place on May 14, 2025—three or four days before Portnov met with Mindich. An article in Ukrayinska Pravda about Portnov’s murder, published on June 15, 2026, reported that one of Portnov’s associates said Portnov did not see Andriy Yermak, the director of Zelenskyy’s presidential office, in the light he had hoped for—

“He didn’t respond to him the way he expected, Portnov actually had influence over many areas of the state. He managed many processes. And that didn’t suit Yermak, because he himself wanted to control everything.”

Several people from Portnov’s inner circle told Ukrayinska Pravda that the conflict with Yermak was long-standing and systemic. According to them, the parties had long since passed the point beyond which compromise or reconciliation had become impossible. Yermak is currently under investigation for his involvement in corruption at Energoatom. It is likely that Mindich,whom Portnov viewed as a mediator between himself and Zelenskyy, asked Portnov to arrange for Chernyshov’s acquittal in court. Following Portnov’s murder, the Zelenskyy administration’s efforts to prosecute Petro Poroshenko came to a halt. The last article on this topic was published 8 days after Portnov´s murder on May 29, 2025. However, on July 10, 2026, the Ukrainian Administrative Court of Cassation, part of the Supreme Court, refused to lift the Ukrainian sanctions imposed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy against Ukraine’s fifth president, Petro Poroshenko.

The investigation into Portnov’s murder led to the arrest in Germany of Alexander Azizov, one of two brothers originally from Ukraine who had been making a living by smuggling drugs across Europe until then. On May 21, 2026—one year after Portonv’s murder—the Ukrainian news site Ukrainian Reality reported that Spain, which had been conducting a joint investigation into the murder with Ukraine, had requested Azizov’s extradition from Germany in February 2026. However, Germany has not yet extradited him. Azizov may not yet have revealed the name of the person who ordered the murder in Germany. The German Federal Prosecutor General’s Office issued a statement in response to the Spanish request, in which it wrote:

“The case carries significant international weight, as it is intertwined with political events in Ukraine and the activities of high-ranking officials. The murder of Portnov, who held key government positions, has the potential to generate new political tensions between Ukraine and other countries involved in the investigation. The extradition process and subsequent legal steps could impact international cooperation in the spheres of justice and security.“

A statement from the German public prosecutor’s office suggests that Germany fears that revealing the identity of the person who ordered the assassination could influence the outcome of the war in Ukraine and the European Union’s subsequent possible acquisition of the part of Ukraine that had aligned itself with Russia and rebelled against its accession to the EU. In the modern western democratic political “slang“ wars for “security“ usually stand for wars for new territories.

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Mojmir Babacek was born in 1947 in Prague, Czech Republic. Graduated in 1972 at Charles University in Prague in philosophy and political economy.

In 1978 signed the document defending human rights in  communist Czechoslovakia „Charter 77“. Since 1981 until 1988 lived in emigration in the USA. Since 1996 he has published articles on different subjects mostly in the Czech and international alternative media.

In 2010, he published a book on the 9/11 attacks in the Czech language. Since the 1990‘s he has been striving to help to achieve the international ban of remote control of the activity of the human nervous system and human minds with the use of neurotechnology.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: Portnov in 2014 (CC BY 3.0)

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