A grisly murder took place on Sunday evening in Ukrainian capital Kiev, when the 3-year old son of Kiev regional council lawmaker Vyacheslav Sobolev was shot dead. The child succumbed to his injuries in the ambulance.
According to reports, the lawmaker was returning from a restaurant that he owns with his family when an unknown assailant approached the Range Rover he was driving and fired at the moving car. The attackers attempted to shoot Sobolev through the driver's side window but it was his young son who was hit.
The child died in the ambulance, en-route to hospital, Reuters reported. Ukraine's Internal Ministry took to Facebook to inform about the incident, without revealing the identity of the deceased or the vehicle's owner. "As a result of a gunshot wound, a child died in a car ambulance on the way to hospital", the statement read.
The gunmen are believed to have fled the scene in a Lexus sedan. A police search of the shooter is underway, and the incident is being investigated as premeditated murder.
Vycheslav Sobolev, businessman and Kiev regional council lawmaker
Sobolev, 35, is a businessman from Ukraine's pro-Russia, insurgency-hit Donetsk region, located in the country's east. The region has seen festering violence since the Russian annexation of Crimean peninsula, which was a major assault on Ukrainian sovereignty. Several murders have taken place in the capital Kiev since the 2014 annexation and the pro-Russia insurgency that flared up in the country's east, since 2014.
Pavel Sheremet, a Belarussian journalist known for his criticism of his home country's leadership and his friendship with the slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was killed in a car bomb in Kiev in 2016. In June, this year, in yet another assault, Russian government started giving passports to Ukrainians living in separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Sobolev, Kiev regional council lawmaker, has also served as an executive at Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz during 2011-12. He has also served as deputy mayor of the insurgency-hit Donetsk.
