The alleged killer of Andriy Portnov – a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician shot dead in Madrid last year – was arrested in Germany on Wednesday, Spain’s police force said.
Portnov was once a highly influential figure in Ukraine. A close ally of former President Viktor Yanukovych, he fled to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Maidan revolution, before moving to Western Europe.
According to Reuters, the suspect was detained in Heinsburg, a town in southwest Germany near the Dutch border. Few other details are known about the suspect, except that the investigation points towards them being the shooter.
Portnov was 51 years old when he was killed in May 2025, shortly after dropping off his children outside an American private school in a suburb of Madrid.
At the time, a source within the Spanish police reportedly told AFP that Portnov had been shot in the back and head by several attackers, before they fled into a nearby wooded area.
Born in Ukraine’s Luhansk region, Portnov had been sanctioned by the US since December 2021 – on the grounds that he had “cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine’s judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery” in between entering the Verkhovna Rada in 2006 and fleeing the country after Yanukovych was ousted.
A number of former lawmakers on both ends of the political spectrum have been assassinated in recent years. Ukraine’s former parliamentary speaker, Andriy Parubiy, was assassinated in Ukraine’s western Lviv region in late 2025.