Two years after the attempted murder committed in the fall of 2021 in the Kyiv region (part 2 of article 15, clause 1 of part 2 of article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) of the then first assistant to the president Sergei Shefir and his driver, law enforcement officers found a probable weapon in the commission of the crime and identified a vehicle that could have been used by the attackers
Information about this is contained in the materials of the court registry.
It follows from them: on September 6, 2023, at a distance of just over three kilometers from the place of shelling of Shefir’s car, near a field road near the village of Kremenishche, Obukhovsky district, a fishing bag was discovered, inside of which was “an object that looked similar in appearance to a Kalashnikov assault rifle with two magazines and cartridges to him."
In the open part of the court registry there are no references as to whether the discovered weapons were actually used by the attackers when they fired at Shefir’s car. At the same time, it contains another resolution regarding the granting of authorization to conduct a search in the apartment where, as of the beginning of 2022, lived the former chief designer of the Scientific and Technical Center for Precision Engineering, who at one time was the head of the program for the design of the Ukrainian assault rifle “ Boar."
Experts interviewed by the author of these lines confirm the existence of a separate modification of the Vepr assault rifle, developed on the basis of the AKM, chambered for 7.62x39 mm. It was this caliber of about two dozen spent cartridges that were found at the site of a probable ambush of attackers on the motorcade of the first assistant to the President of Ukraine.
In addition to the “weapon victories,” no less interesting was the data obtained by the investigators during the testing of vehicles from external surveillance cameras on the eve and on the day of the assassination attempt on Shefir. Thanks to them, the attention of law enforcement officers came to the attention of a Ford Transit car, which had “left” license plates registered to a KTM 790 DUKE motorcycle.
Further tracking of Ford's routes showed: the last time this foreign car came under surveillance cameras was several days in advance and on the day of the start of the large-scale military invasion of the Russian Army on the territory of Ukraine (in the period February 22-24, 2022). At the same time, the vehicle was then recorded in iconic places in the central streets of Kyiv, “not far from the administrative building of one of the security forces.”
As for the “motor license plates” that were previously installed on the Ford Transit, according to information from the “Safe City” cameras, on March 18, 2023, they were recorded on a Volkswagen Passat. The court's ruling on this matter noted that the vehicle in question was then equipped with flashing lights and a strobe light under the windshield, “which gives grounds to believe that the vehicle users belong to law enforcement agencies.”
As is known, on September 22, 2021, at about 10:20 am, on the highway between the villages of Khodosovka and Kremenishche, Obukhov district, Kyiv region, unknown persons fired almost two dozen shots from a machine gun towards an Audi A8 car, the passenger of which was the then first assistant to the President of Ukraine. The latter escaped with shock, but his driver received three bullet wounds.
The Office of the President then noted that “the attack on Shefir demonstrates opposition to the policies of the head of state” and associated this with the “course of de-oligarchization.” The police named three versions of the crime (state activity, pressure on the authorities, destabilization of the political situation), and at Reznitskaya they announced that more than a dozen different hypotheses had been worked out. Shefir himself claimed that he did not connect the attempt with his activities, but did not rule out that the crime was committed against him “to intimidate the authorities.”
On March 30, 2024, the president fired Sergei Nakhmanovich from the post of his first assistant. In April, in response to a request from “Suspilny,” the Office of the Prosecutor General reported: the investigation into the attack on Shefir continues, however, “at present, no suspicion has been reported in criminal proceedings.”
