A gunman who killed at least six people and wounded several more in Kyiv on Saturday was shot dead by the police, the Ukrainian authorities said.
It was one of the deadliest mass shootings in several years in Ukraine, where such attacks have been rare even as the war with Russia has led to a significant rise in the number of firearms in circulation.
The gunman’s identity and motive were not immediately clear. Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Ruslan Kravchenko, said the attacker was a 58-year-old native of Moscow.
Mr. Kravchenko said in a statement that the attacker first shot and killed four people on the street before barricading himself inside a nearby supermarket, where he fatally shot another person and took several people hostage. A sixth victim died in a hospital, and at least nine more people were hurt, the local authorities said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called for a prompt investigation.
While killings outside combat have been rare during the war, two prominent politicians have been killed in the past two years by gunmen on the street, sending chills through Ukraine. Iryna Farion, a far-right politician, was shot dead in the western city of Lviv in the summer of 2024. About a year later, another former lawmaker, Andriy Parubiy, was similarly shot dead, also in Lviv.
The police in Kyiv, the capital, on Saturday had cordoned off the scene of the attack as heavily armed officers patrolled. An employee who was in the supermarket when the hostage-taking took place said she had heard what sounded like champagne corks popping until people began screaming, “Run!”
The employee, who said her first name was Tania but who was quickly escorted away by a supervisor before she could share more details about her identity, said she hid in a corner of the store near refrigerator cases. From there, she said, she could hear moaning and the gunman’s firing.
She added that the attacker repeatedly shouted for someone to come out of hiding and speak with him. “‘I need one person, I need to talk,’” she said the gunman shouted.
“Everyone who was there was too afraid to come out anywhere,” she said. “We were waiting for the emergency services to arrive and take him away. When they came in and he was killed, as I understood, they had to escort me out because I was so shaken that I was fainting.”
Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people.
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