Andriy Parubiy Now Guards Ukraine at the Head of the Heavenly Hundred

Source: Author’s Facebook page

I began these lines five times—and crossed them out five times. How can one capture in words the 11 years we walked side by side?

He lived on the Maidan.

He trained the Maidan self-defense units, which were the first to go to the front in April 2014, when Russia thought it could easily capture the Donbas.

From the Maidan, we moved together to the National Security and Defense Council, where Klyuyev’s furniture still stood. One of the first decisions we made was to sell all the Lexuses and jeeps and transfer the money to the state budget. Andriy’s modesty was, in general, remarkable.

During the day, he worked at the National Security and Defense Council, and every evening he returned to the Maidan, because that was where the people were—and they were what mattered most.

We were elected to the 8th Parliament together as part of the Popular Front, and I supported him for the position of First Vice-Speaker during the faction discussion. Ultimately, Andriy became Speaker and implemented an incredible number of pro-state reforms.

In this, he and I spoke the same language—and that language was Ukrainian. Yes, he sometimes put certain matters to a vote multiple times, for which he was later heavily criticized. But he was shaping Ukrainian history.

It was a difficult convocation—people with weapons, checkers on duty, grenades in the Rada. Yet he was one of the few who managed it all with dignity.

In 2019, we were re-elected to Parliament as part of European Solidarity, and we needed to ensure that nothing from 2014 to 2019 would be undone. Andriy knew how to fight at decisive moments—what is history worth if, alone, he had not thrown a smoke bomb in the Rada during the vote on one of the gravest betrayals: the Kharkiv agreements?

When the full-scale invasion began, Andriy joined the volunteers defending Kyiv. In the 206th Battalion, he went to the frontline and served alongside everyone in the trenches. In this photo from early March, he had just returned from duty. His face was red from the frost, and he spoke enthusiastically about the conversations on Ukrainian history the men held at night in those cold trenches—how history was being created again before our very eyes.

By the way, with this photo and these memories, I had congratulated him on his birthday, running into the banter of the court TG channels, whose goal was to discredit anyone who was truly a statesman.

When the Russians left the Kyiv region, he believed that we had succeeded in the most important thing—not to lose the state. He was absolutely thrilled by the heroism of the Ukrainian people, who had managed to do it this time… And he was very optimistic about our shared Ukrainian future. This was, in fact, our last conversation, very recently, when he told me again: Ukraine is more precious than politics, and that is what should guide us.

Only the death of a person so often reveals how they truly lived. Andriy created modern Ukrainian history far more than what was visible on the pages of the press. He was an enemy of the Russians because he could defend Ukraine—and that was the work of his life.

He was incredibly modest, lived in the Kyiv Hotel, and loved his daughter and family dearly. Furthermore, he had been repeatedly warned about the “hit lists” that included his name, yet the Ukrainian state, in the form of its authorities, did not provide him with official protection.

People write in the comments that he is now at the head of his Maidan self-defense forces from the Heavenly Hundred… I know for certain that there, too, he will protect Ukraine, which was always above all for him.

As a reminder, a suspect in the murder of European Solidarity MP Andriy Parubiy was detained in Ukraine. The perpetrator of the crime was identified less than two days after the tragedy.

The suspect in the high-profile crime turned out to be a resident. It is known that he acted deliberately, and investigators do not exclude or confirm the presence of a Russian trace. As sources of “Pryamyi” in law enforcement agencies report, the Russians have a whole list of people to eliminate, especially in patriotic circles.

Subsequently, the 52-year-old resident of Lviv was officially declared a suspect. It also became known that for a year, Russian special services blackmailed the detainee with information about the whereabouts of his son, who is considered missing in action during the war.

At the same time, the Security Service of Ukraine reported the involvement of Russian special services in organizing the assassination attempt on MP Andriy Parubiy. Such data were obtained during the first investigative and operational actions after the arrest of the killer.

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