Wednesday’s helicopter crash included Ukraine’s Interior Minister and several members of his leadership team among the victims, believed to be the highest-ranking government officials to have been killed since… Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky, first deputy Yevheniy Yenin, secretary of state Yuriy Lubkovychis, helicopter crew and several ministerial aides were killed in the crash on the outskirts of Brovary, Kyiv.
Monastyrsky, 42, is a trained lawyer. According to a biography posted on the ministry’s website, he spent several years teaching law and management at a university in his hometown of Khmelnytskyi, before deciding to switch “from theory to practice” and enter politics.
He worked to reform Ukrainian law enforcement after the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, promoted and was appointed interior minister in July 2021.
Last year, Monastyrsky accompanied the CNN crew on a visit to abandoned Russian military sites in Chernobyl.
Yenin, also 42, served as deputy prosecutor general and deputy foreign minister of Ukraine before becoming Monastyrsky’s first deputy in September 2021, according to the ministry’s website.
Lubkovychis is 33 years old and, like the other two men, is also appointed to the ministry in 2021.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement that Monastyrsky, Yenin and Lubkovychis were “true patriots of Ukraine.”
