A man killed by a grenade that went off inside a moving car in Kyiv on the night of April 27 was identified as Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Kuksa, several Ukrainian media reported, quoting their sources.
The police didn’t confirm the name yet although Kuksa’s friends and colleagues shared their condolences on social media.
Kuksa, 45, was a journalist and a veteran of the war in the Donbas. He used to work as a spokesman and then advisor for the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (DerzhSpetsZvyazok) in 2014-2015. Later, he covered war-related topics for several online publications, focusing specifically on signalmen in the Ukrainian army.
Kuksa was in the passenger seat of a Chevrolet car driving down Mykhaila Drahomanova Street in the densely populated residential neighborhood Poznyaky in the southeastern part of the city when a grenade went off inside the car, killing Kuksa and badly injuring the car’s driver, an unidentified man.
The police video shows forensic specialists inspecting the car in which a grenade went off in Kyiv on April 27. (National Police)
The driver was hospitalized. As of April 28, he was yet unable to give testimony about what happened.
The police said that the two men knew each other but released no further details. They investigate the case as a deliberate murder but also look into a possibility that one of the men blew up the grenade by accident.
Communications specialist Yaryna Klyuchkovska, who knew Kuksa, shared her condolences in a Facebook post and praised him as a journalist with an excellent knowledge of his field – telecommunications.
“He really knew the topic, he could corner me with his questions, and he was always interesting to argue with,” she wrote. “Vitaliy always was full of life and full of ideas. It hurts so much to know we will never argue again.”
Kuksa was the second Ukrainian journalist to die in a car blast in Kyiv in the recent years. Prominent Ukrainian-Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed by a bomb planted into his car in July 2016. Nearly two years later, the investigation still has no results.
