Former Ukrainian politician Andriy Portnov has been shot dead outside an American school in Madrid.
According to CNN, Portnov, who worked as the senior aide to pro-Russian former President Viktor Yanukovych, was shot multiple times outside The American School of Madrid while getting into a car around 9:15 am local time (3:15 a.m. ET) on Wednesday, May 21, 2025.
As per a Spanish national police source, various shot the 51-year-old in the back and the head before escaping into a wooded area.
A Spanish police source told El País, “One shot, the fatal one, was to the head, at the level of the neck, from behind but at an angle, and the other two were to the body, in the abdomen and side.”
Radio station Cadena SER said that the police rushed to the school located in Pozuelo de Alarcon, an affluent suburb just west of Madrid, after receiving the report of the incident at 9:15 am, where Portnov was believed to have been taking his children to school.
Living in exile for over a decade:
Portnov served as the senior aide to Yanukovich before he was ousted in 2014 by Ukraine's 2014 Orange Revolution. Since then, he was living in exile.
After fleeing from Ukraine in 2014, he briefly lived in Russia and then moved to Austria. However, it is not known when he came to Spain.
In 2018, the security service of Ukraine opened a state treason investigation against him over the allegation of involvement in Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 but closed it in 2019.
He was sanctioned by the US in 2021, being designated as someone "responsible for or complicit in, or (who) has directly or indirectly engaged in, corruption, including the misappropriation of state assets, the expropriation of private assets for personal gain, corruption related to government contracts or the extraction of natural resources, or bribery."
Notably, Spanish police are investigating the incident from two possible angles: a politically motivated attack or organised crime.
