Shot Dead in Madrid – Who is Andriy Portnov?

Ukrainian politician Andriy Portnov was shot dead in Spain near Madrid. According to police reports, the killer (or killers) fired several shots, one of which hit Portnov in the head and was fatal.

Portnov was wanted by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and had been under US sanctions for several years. At the same time, Ukrainian social networks met Portnov’s murder with a standing ovation.

Who was Andriy Portnov?

He was one of the key figures of the Viktor Yanukovych era who played a leading role in attempts to increase Russian influence over Ukraine but how did he turn from a leader of the Democratic Party to become a pro-Russian politician and manage to accumulate the hatred of most Ukrainians?

Andriy Portnov was born in 1973 in Voroshilovgrad – now called Luhansk. In his youth, as his fellow countryman and acquaintance Konstantin Reutsky recalls, Portnov deserted from military service and even survived a severe electric shock on public transport. However, this did not affect his studies or career.

He proved to be a very capable lawyer, worked for the Securities Commission, founded his own law firm, and very soon moved to work for political parties. After the 2004 Orange Revolution he joined Yulia Tymoshenko’s party where he was twice elected a people’s deputy.

However, the political instability of this period and Portnov’s ambitions led to a sharp change in his political stance. In 2010, he unexpectedly left Tymoshenko’s bloc and accepted an invitation from Viktor Yanukovych to join his administration after winning the presidential election.

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This willingness to abandon his colleagues and switch to a diametrically opposed political camp began to alienate Portnov from his contemporaries and friends. As a well-known Kyiv lawyer told Kyiv Post, “Portnov died for me as a lawyer. I saw that he was ready to apply his knowledge not for the truth, but to provide a legal face to the actions of Yanukovych, which were far from legal.”

Another well-known lawyer from that period, Tatyana Montyan, who defected to Russia and is now in occupied Donetsk, told us that many lawyers at the time disliked Portnov’s willingness to help legally implement the political goals of the Yanukovych regime.

Although Portnov formally served as deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine and head of the main department for judicial reform and the judicial system, his signature did not appear on the initiatives of Yanukovych’s government.

However, numerous sources said he was a “gray cardinal” who exerted enormous influence on the judicial system at the time. It was believed that Portnov was the mastermind, if not the author, of the scandalous “dictatorial laws” introduced on Jan. 16, 2014, by which the Yanukovych regime criminalized almost any protest activity in an attempt to suppress Euromaidan.

However, this proved unsuccessful. After Yanukovych’s fall that February, Portnov fled the country. He escaped to Russia, like other figures from the regime, where he and his family began buying up real estate which included a 900-square-meter (9,700 square feet) house and 2,000 square meters (21,500 square feet) of office space in central Moscow.

Ukraine’s attempts to prosecute him failed spectacularly – because it was strongly suspected there were a large number of people in the prosecutor’s office, courts, and other legal bodies who still felt loyalty to him – and so all cases against him fell apart.

“The vast majority of materials on Portnov are not procedurally fixed and are exclusively emotional in nature. What needed to be done in ‘hot pursuit’ between March and April 2014 is lost, unfortunately, forever. Portnov knows this and has already remotely won several lawsuits to protect honor and dignity and refute ‘false’ information [against him],” Viktor Yahun retired general of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said.

Indeed, Portnov won several lawsuits demanding “protection of his honor and dignity,” brought against several publications at once, including Left Bank and Censor.net. There is no record of a lawsuit against The Kyiv Independent, which is not a “pro-Russian” publication.

Kyiv Post’s sources note that this paradox resulted from what was a nascent Ukrainian democracy – when democratic methods, procedures, and values, in conditions of imperfect legislation, are skillfully used by those who do not share democratic values.

For five years, a lack of will among law enforcement leadership to pursue cases against Portnov, many thay completely fell apart – then in 2019, he returned to Ukraine.

On July 4, 2019, Portnov wrote on Facebook that he had developed a bill prohibiting people from working in government bodies who had held public office between the Maidan victory and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration.

A week later, Zelensky himself signed up to a similar initiative, saying that “his team” had developed a bill on “strengthening lustration.” According to journalists from Texty.org.ua, this indicated that Zelensky was openly cooperating with Portnov. However, no direct connection between the new president’s team and Portnov was ever found.

In December 2021, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control added Portnov to its sanctions list on charges of involvement in large-scale corruption in Ukraine, particularly in relation to the judiciary. According to the US Treasury Portnov established ties with Ukraine’s judicial and law enforcement agencies by way of bribery.

This also did not result in any consequences for Portnov within Ukraine. He continued to live a private life, writing posts in Russian on social media, promising repression against patriots, Maidan participants, and volunteers. He maintained an account on Telegram, where he adhered to Russian propaganda narratives, focusing on anti-Ukrainian messaging.

In particular, he defended pro-Russian TV channels linked to Viktor Medvedchuk – the former Ukrainian lawyer, politician and oligarch – which were sanctioned by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council in 2021.

Ukrainian volunteer Serhiy Sternenko, who survived an assassination attempt and was one of the leaders of the Ukrainian movement in Odesa, was called a “murderer and scumbag” by Portnov. Also, according to veterans of the battles against separatists in the Donbas in 2014–2019, he attacked them referring to them as “Banderites,” and promised future reprisals against.

During the full-scale invasion, Portnov was able to leave Ukraine – whether individuals from the current government played any role in his escape is still debated.

Reactions to his assassination

Many on Ukrainian social networks reacted with surprise glee to the news of unexpected Portnov’s death.

“There is justice – finally, Portnov will appear in a court, that he won’t be able to buy,” MP, former public figure, and historian Volodymyr Vyatrovych wrote.

“There is a window of opportunity to clean up the judicial system and move justice reform forward,” Oksana Romaniuk, head of the Institute of Mass Information wrote.

“Portnov was a special person. First, he skillfully used the law – a tool designed to protect against dictatorship and arbitrariness – and turned it into a means for establishing tyranny and lawlessness. And this juggling had few equals.”

“Secondly, his arrogance was exorbitant. He sincerely promised to deal with all of us. He wrote threats in private messages to Maidan investigators and even threatened me on Facebook.”

“As a particularly brazen enemy, he wisely fled as soon as Russian guns began to speak to us in full force instead of his tame cops and judges,” Ihor Lutsenko, a Maidan activist and public figure who was captured and tortured by representatives of the Yanukovych regime, wrote on Facebook.

“Portnov was an ideological enemy. A man who obviously hated everything Ukrainian. And if Russia had managed to capture Kyiv in 2022, I have no doubt that he personally, having taken a high position in the occupation authorities, would have ordered imprisonments and executions of many of us, for sure. And the influence that he maintained in Ukraine until today was a real threat to national security,” the investigative journalist Yevheniya Motorevska said.