‘A court fixer’ Who was Andriy Portnov, the former Ukrainian official and Yanukovych ally shot dead outside Madrid?

Andriy Portnov, a former top aide to ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, was shot dead in a wealthy neighborhood outside Madrid on Wednesday. The ex-official was reportedly killed shortly after dropping off his children at the American School of Madrid, an elite private school in the suburb of Pozuelo de Alarcón. As of this writing, the attackers are still at large, and the motives for the killing remain unknown. Portnov, 51, fled Ukraine during the 2014 Maidan Revolution but returned five years later, after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president. The U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Portnov in 2021, citing allegations of corruption and bribery. He then fled Ukraine again after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, despite wartime restrictions on men of draft age leaving the country. Meduza looks back on Portnov’s controversial political career. 

Andriy Portnov was killed outside his children’s school in Pozuelo de Alarcón by unidentified gunmen, shot several times as he was getting into his car, according to Spanish media. El País reported that two or three attackers fled the scene after the shooting. According to El Mundo, police suspect that the killing may either be linked to an organized crime group “settling scores” or that it was politically motivated. 

Born in Luhansk, Portnov was a lawyer by training. He moved to Kyiv in the late 1990s, where he began working for the National Securities and Stock Market Commission. He was elected to the Ukrainian parliament in 2006 as a member of a political bloc led by then–Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Portnov would go on to head Tymoshenko’s legal team and defend her interests in court, including in several proceedings against former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. 

In 2010, Portnov joined the administration of Viktor Yanukovych, who had succeeded Yushchenko as president. Yanukovych appointed Portnov as his deputy chief of staff and point person for judicial reform. During the 2013–2014 Euromaidan protests, Portnov, along with then–Justice Minister Olena Lukash, was part of Yanukovych’s working group on resolving the political crisis. After Yanukovych was ousted in February 2014, Portnov fled Ukraine for Russia and then moved to Austria. He later told Ukrainska Pravda that joining Yanukovych’s working group was a “big mistake,” saying, “the role of being the face of Anti-Maidan fell to us.”

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Ukrainian authorities opened several criminal investigations against Portnov after he fled the country, including on charges of high treason, abuse of office, and embezzlement. Portnov, who was subsequently placed under E.U. sanctions, denied all the allegations against him. The E.U. lifted its sanctions against him following a 2015 court ruling in his favor. 

Portnov returned to Ukraine in 2019, shortly after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president. “Friends, I haven’t been in my country for more than five years. And today I want to give a confident signal to the thousands of people who have left Ukraine. It’s time to return, build, and restore,” he wrote on Telegram at the time. 

After returning to Ukraine, Portnov began filing criminal complaints against Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko. In applications to the State Bureau of Investigation, he accused the former president of seizing power, committing treason and economic crimes, and abusing his office, also calling for the confiscation of his assets in Ukraine and abroad. Ukrainian investigators ultimately launched a preliminary investigation into whether Poroshenko committed treason by signing the 2015 Minsk agreements, which sought to resolve the war in eastern Ukraine. 

According to the Ukrainian news outlet Liga, Portnov “developed the image of someone close to [Zelensky’s] team” due to his friendship with Andriy Bohdan, then Zelensky’s chief of staff, and ties to campaign financiers. However, Zelensky publicly denied that Portnov had any influence over his administration, telling journalists, “I don’t know Mr. Portnov.” 

The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Portnov for alleged corruption in 2021, describing the ex-official as a widely known “court fixer” who had “cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine’s judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery.” “As of 2019, Portnov took steps to control the Ukrainian judiciary, influence legislation, place loyal officials in top positions, and purchase court decisions,” the Treasury said. 

In June 2022, journalists from Schemes, an investigative project run by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, reported that Portnov had fled Ukraine through a checkpoint on the border with Hungary, despite the wartime ban on draft-age men leaving the country. In an earlier investigation, Schemes revealed that Portnov’s family owned luxury real estate in Moscow together with friends of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. 

Portnov also had a reputation for frequently filing and winning defamation lawsuits against Ukrainian media outlets. In December 2024, the Ukrainian media network Mediarukh (Media Movement) publicly urged President Zelensky to propose sanctions against Portnov, citing journalistic investigations alleging his continued influence over the Ukrainian judiciary.