Ukrainian Lawmaker Andriy Ivanchuk Dies Aged 50

Andriy Ivanchuk, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, died in the early hours of Sept. 25 at the age of 50.

“Terrible news. Overnight, Andriy Ivanchuk… passed away into eternity. My sincere condolences to his family and friends in connection with his untimely death,” the speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, Ruslan Stefanchuk, wrote on his Facebook page on today.

The cause of his death remains unknown. Lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko, however, noted while expressing his condolences that a blood clot may have been the cause.

Andriy Ivanchuk was born on June 16, 1973, in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk.

Ivanchuk first entered the Verkhovna Rada in 2012 as a member of the Batkivshchyna party. In the extraordinary elections of 2014, he ran for parliament with the People’s Front party of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was the prime minister from 2014 to 2016.\

During his tenure, Ivanchuk had been implicated in several corruption controversies.

In 2016, as a parliamentarian serving as deputy head of the People’s Front parliamentary faction, Ivanchuk traveled to Kyiv from Nice on a private Gulfstream-200 plane and was criticized in the press for taking an expensive flight that his declared salary as parliamentarian could ill-afford.

In 2017, investigative journalists from the “Our Money” project, revealed Ivanchuk’s connection with the BF Group company, which was involved in a scandal related to the forced seizure of real estate in the center of Kyiv.

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At that time, investigators pointed out that the director of BF Group was Ivanchuk’s former parliamentary assistant, and the lawmaker’s family estate near Kyiv was registered in the assistant’s name.

And in 2019, Ivanchuk was elected to the Verkhovna Rada for the 9th convocation as a non-party candidate. He was a member of the Trust parliamentary group and served on the parliamentary committee on finance, tax, and customs policy.