Iryna Farion, a former member of Ukraine’s parliament and prominent advocate for the Ukrainian language, has died after being shot in Lviv.
The incident occurred on a street in the western city, and police have launched an extensive search for the suspected gunman.
Regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyi announced Farion’s death on Telegram after she was hospitalized, The Guardian reports.
Initially, Interior Minister, Ihor Klymenko, stated that the shooting was being investigated as an attempted assassination.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is receiving updates on the efforts to apprehend the gunman and has emphasized that any act of violence is condemnable.
Farion, a linguist and former member of the nationalist Svoboda party, served in parliament from 2012 to 2014 and later on the Lviv regional council.
She was known for her passionate campaigns to promote the Ukrainian language and criticize public officials who spoke Russian.
In 2018, when Ukraine was fighting Russian-financed separatists who had seized territory in the east, she called for a drive to “punch every Russian-speaking person in the jaw”.
In the early months of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Farion denounced Russian-speaking fighters of the Azov regiment who defended the port city of Mariupol for three months.
Although Ukrainian is the sole state language of Ukraine, many of its people speak Russian as a first language, a legacy of Soviet rule, when Ukrainian was under official pressure.
Promoting the language has long been an important issue, with parliament passing legislation to entrench its use in public life and in the services industry.
