Ukrainian ex-politician shot dead outside elite American school in Madrid

Unidentified gunmen shot dead a former Ukrainian politician on Wednesday outside a school in a wealthy suburb of Madrid, Spain's interior ministry said.

Andriy Portnov, 51, was previously a senior aide to a pro-Russian former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in a 2014 popular uprising.

Police reached the scene after receiving calls at 9.15am about a man with gunshot wounds on the street outside the American School of Madrid, in the Pozuelo de Alarcon suburb west of the capital, police officials told Reuters.

“Several people shot him in the back and the head and then fled towards a forested area,” an interior ministry source said.

When emergency services arrived they found Portnov dead with at least three gunshot wounds, a spokesperson said.

Police had covered the body of a person wearing white running shoes lying near a black Mercedes-Benz car in a cordoned-off pavement outside the school.

Portnov left for Russia in 2014 and faced investigations in Ukraine over accusations of treason and embezzlement. He was targeted with EU sanctions, though those and the charges were later dropped.

The US Treasury department put Portnov on its sanctions list in 2021, saying he had “cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine's judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery”.

The American School said it believed the victim was a father of children at the school but was waiting for formal identification by the police, according to a letter sent to parents seen by Reuters.

It said police were on campus interviewing parents who witnessed the incident. A spokesperson for the school did not reply to a request for comment on the incident or the letter.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there have been several high-profile crimes related to Russia and Ukraine in Spain, which has significant expatriate communities from both countries.

In 2022 a retired Spanish civil servant sent six letter bombs to targets around Spain, including to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the Ukrainian and US embassies and government offices. Pompeyo Gonzalez Pascual was convicted and jailed for the offences last year.

In February 2024, a Russian pilot who had defected to Ukraine with his helicopter was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds in the parking garage of his apartment block near Alicante in southeastern Spain.

Reuters