In Ukraine, a female politician who was a member of the far-right nationalist movement with often highly controversial positions was shot dead on a street in Lviv, in the west of the country, on Friday, July 19. Iryna Farion was a former member of parliament and a prominent specialist in the Ukrainian language. The radical nature of her positions had regularly drawn her into public scandals.
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With our correspondent in kyiv, Stephane Siohan
In Ukraineit is a political and bloody news item. Iryna Farion, 60, was a renowned philologist of the Ukrainian language, a teacher at the Polytechnic University of Lviv. The latter had started a political career by becoming a deputy of the extreme-right nationalist party Svoboda between 2012 and 2014. This Friday, July 19, she was fatally wounded by a bullet in the head in a street in Lviv, by a young man armed with a handgun.
A public figure, but relatively marginal, Iryna Farion has long promoted the Ukrainian language. She has regularly hit the headlines in recent years because of her vehement hostility towards Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who represent a significant portion of the population.
Under police surveillance for several months
In 2022, her radical ethnolinguistic nationalism backfires as she publicly criticizes fighters of the Azov battalion. The latter are in full defense of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol and are themselves nationalists. But for Iryna Farion, under the pretext that they speak Russian, they are not real Ukrainians.
This extreme position revolts many Ukrainians. Because although many inhabitants naturally adopted the Ukrainian language In recent years, speaking Russian has rarely meant support for Russia. Some have accused Farion of sowing seeds of discord in the middle of the war, thus playing into the hands of the enemy.
The linguist had been under police surveillance for several months. For the moment, the police are favouring the theory of “ personal enmity because of his social and political activities “, as the motive for his murder.
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