Unknown assailants have attacked a local activist and candidate for parliament who days earlier complained to President Volodymyr Zelensky that organized crime was holding back the development of his city.
Andriy Tolpekin, a lawyer and candidate for the Verkhovna Rada, was returning home at around 2:40 a.m. on July 20 when two men attacked him. The attackers struck Tolpekin on the head without issuing any threats, and then fled the scene of the crime, according to the National Police.
Tolpekin is running as an independent candidate in single-member district No. 128 in Mykolaiv, a city of 480,000 people located 460 kilometers south of Kyiv. The country will go to the polls to elect a new parliament on July 21.
In a video posted on Tolpekin’s Facebook page, the candidate speaks with police to report the crime. He has a visible cut on the back of his head. One of his associates holds up a white dress shirt stained with blood that Tolpekin was wearing when he was attacked.
Police have opened a criminal investigation into the “infliction of light bodily harm.”
On July 17, while Zelensky was visiting Mykolaiv, Tolpekin managed to speak with the president as he inspected the local airport.
“No one comes here. Not investors, no one,” Tolpekin told Zelensky. “Organized crime has infected all the structures of the authorities.”
Tolpekin said he wanted to direct attention to the victims a local mafia boss.
“Here in Mykolaiv Oblast, we need to create a special division of law enforcement to carry out an operation” to clean up the city, he said. “Otherwise not a single businessperson, not a single investor will come.”
Tolpekin also told Zelensky that he was ready to lead such a special division.
Tolpekin is running against 10 other candidates for parliament in district No. 128. Among the most prominent are Artem Iliuk, the incumbent lawmaker from the district, and Artem Khachaturov, a former lawmaker of the Mykolaiv Oblast Council.
Iliuk was elected to parliament as an independent candidate in 2014, but is a member of the Vidrodzhennia (“Revival”) party faction in the legislature. He is again running as an independent. Khachaturov is running with the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc party.
Both men were previously members of the Party of Regions of ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych, and Iliuk represented the party in the 7th convocation of the Rada in 2012-2014.
