RKSL
The Frontline
September 3, 2025
As soon as we learned that the man who murdered Andriy Parubiy was the estranged father of a Ukrainian hero our gut reaction, our instinct, was that this was Russia’s hand. Nothing in it was by chance. What we call instinct was in fact recognition. History told us what we were seeing: Russia once again striking at Ukraine by turning betrayal into a weapon.
The killer’s target, Parubiy, embodied everything Moscow has sought to erase. He stood at the center of the Revolution of Dignity, guiding Ukraine through nights when its future was carried on the shoulders of courage and sacrifice. Later, as Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, he gave voice to sovereignty at a moment when Russia worked to fracture Ukraine’s institutions. His life was bound to the idea that independence must be defended, that dignity was not a gift but a duty. He stood for loyalty and for patriotism, and his presence became a symbol of endurance.
The man who killed him was not chosen at random. He was the absentee father of Mykhailo, call sign Lemberg, the well known hero missing in action at Bakhmut. The killer abandoned his family when Lemberg was still an infant and gave him nothing but the accident of birth. He played no role in shaping the man his son became. After the revelation of the killer’s identity, Lemberg’s mother, the writer and photographer Olena Cherninka, wrote that this so-called father had shown nothing but apathy toward his son, that they had not been in contact, and that he had not been present in his life. For the killer to return decades later, not as a parent but as an assassin, could never have been coincidence. It was calculated cruelty, a script written with malice that could only have been conceived in Moscow.
The killer’s declarations revealed the purpose of this choice. He spoke of revenge against Kyiv. He demanded to be exchanged for Ukrainian POWs. He said he would travel to Russia to search for his missing son. Each claim was meant to twist grief and anger away from Moscow and to misdirect it at Ukraine itself. It was an effort to stain the government with blame, to suggest that treachery came not from outside but from within. By forcing the hero Lemberg’s name into the story, Russia sought to corrupt even the pride of honorable sacrifice, to turn a hero into a scandal.
This was a psychological operation in its purest form. This is Russia’s method: the inversion of meaning. A hero’s family becomes a weapon. A patriot’s assassination is recast as vengeance against his own government. Moscow has always known that anger aimed outward strengthens resistance, but anger turned inward destroys it. To misdirect pain away from the aggressor and against one’s own institutions is the surest way to weaken solidarity. The assassination was meant not only to kill a patriot but to break the trust that binds Ukrainians to each other. It aimed to plant suspicion where there had been loyalty, to turn strength into doubt, to undermine the very faith that has carried Ukraine through war.
Only Moscow gained from this crime. Ukraine lost a leader whose life was committed to independence. A community lost a figure of courage. Moscow attempted to force the memory of a hero at Bakhmut, raised by a devoted mother and honored by his nation, into the shadow of his father’s betrayal. Russia cannot defeat Ukraine outright on the battlefield, so it reaches for symbols instead. It strikes at memory. It seeks to hollow out meaning itself. That is why this man was chosen. The killing of Andriy Parubiy was an operation designed to fracture unity and to poison remembrance.
Parubiy’s life was one of service to Ukrainian freedom, and Lemberg’s sacrifice remains untarnished. Their legacies belong to Ukraine, not to Russia’s manipulation. Betrayal cannot erase courage, nor can it undo the love that raised a child into a hero. The memory of our defenders cannot be corrupted. We honor Andriy Parubiy, who gave his life in defense of dignity. We honor Lemberg, who fought with valor at Bakhmut. We honor the mothers who brought such sons into the world with love and devotion to their homeland. Every attempt to defile their memory will only deepen Ukraine’s unity and strengthen its resolve to bring down Russia’s empire.