Suspect arrested in Germany in 2025 Ukrainian aide's killing

DW News · Feb 25, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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A person suspected of killing a former Ukrainian pro-Russian politician outside a wealthy suburb of Madrid in 2025 was arrested in Germany by Spanish and German police, Spain's National Police said on Wednesday. The suspect was arrested in Heinsberg, a German town close to the Dutch border, police said, without providing additional specifics of the arrest. The politician, Andrii Portnov, was a senior aide to Viktor ‌Yanukovych, a former Ukrainian president with close ties to Moscow. Yanukovych was ousted in the 2014 Maidan revolution, where Ukrainians protested the president's decision to pull Ukraine away from the European Union and closer to Russia. He fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014. Andrii Portnov was thought to have returned to Ukraine after Volodymyr Zelenskyy's election in 2019, but left again (Photo: 2013)Image: REUTERS Ukrainian politician was shot several times outside school in June 2025 Portnov was shot several times in the back and the head in June 2025 as he was getting into a vehicle outside the American School of Madrid, where at least one of his children was enrolled. Spain's Interior Ministry said Portnov, who was 51, was shot just as children were arriving at the school, in a wealthy suburb of the Spanish capital. Spanish police released no details about the detained suspect, saying only that the investigation points to them as the person who fired the shots. Portnov left for Russia in 2014 and ⁠later ​faced investigations in Ukraine on ​accusations of treason and embezzlement. He was placed under European Union sanctions, though both the charges and the sanctions were eventually dropped. The US Treasury Department added Portnov to its sanctions list in 2021, saying he had "cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine's judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery." Edited by: Sean Sinico