Andriy Parubiy, the former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament and a leader of the Maidan protests in 2013-14, was killed on Saturday in the western city of Lviv, said President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Zelenskiy, in a post on the X social media platform, called it a “horrendous murder.”

Parubiy, 54, was shot and died of his injuries before medics arrived, according to Lviv region governor Maksym Kozytskyi. Law enforcement officers are establishing the circumstances of the killing, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said.

He was one of the leaders of the street protests that began in 2013 and eventually led to the ousting of the Russian-backed former President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Over 100 people were estimated to have been killed by pro-Russian government forces during the demonstrations.

Weeks later, Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and triggered a military conflict in eastern Ukraine that expanded into Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

In addition to being elected to parliament in 2014, Parubiy also served as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council that same year. He became the speaker of the parliament in 2016 and was re-elected to the legislature in 2019.

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