Teenage suspect held over assassination of Ukrainian language advocate

Ukraine’s president has announced that authorities have detained an 18-year-old suspect over the shooting death of a former legislator who was an advocate for the use of the Ukrainian language instead of Russian.

Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that the suspect in the killing of Iryna Farion, 60, was detained in Dnipro, hundreds of miles to the east.

Ms Farion was gunned down in the street in broad daylight last Friday in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Police said the incident was being treated as an assassination.

Ms Farion’s death shocked Ukraine, and several thousand mourners attended her funeral in Lviv.

She was a member of the Ukrainian parliament between 2012 and 2014, and was best known for campaigns to promote the use of the Ukrainian language by officials who spoke Russian.

Russian speakers are common in eastern parts of Ukraine, by the border with Russia, and some long-serving officials speak Russian after years of Soviet rule.

Since the war started in February 2022, Romania has confirmed drone fragments on its territory on several occasions.

The latest debris was found after Russian attacks on Ukraine’s port infrastructure near the border.

A statement said the fragments were discovered by a team of specialists in an uninhabited area near the village of Plauru in Tulcea county, which is across the Danube River from the Ukrainian port of Izmail.

The discovery came after Russia carried out overnight attacks on “civilian targets and port infrastructure” in Ukraine over the past two nights, the ministry said.

Those assaults prompted Romania to deploy warplanes to monitor its air space.

The ministry condemned the Russian attacks, calling them “unjustified and in serious contradiction with the norms of international law”.

Romania’s emergency authorities issued text alerts both nights to residents living in Tulcea, and Nato allies were kept informed, the ministry said.