Panic in Kiev this Wednesday morning, a few hours from a Council of Ministers.
Ukrainian police have arrested a Donbas war veteran who threatened to detonate a grenade at government headquarters.
“He was arrested,” Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko said.
Special police forces entered the government building and extracted the maniac, according to an AFP photographer on the spot.
He surrendered after "ten minutes" of negotiations with one of his friends whom the police had brought to the scene, the national police chief Igor Klymenko said in a statement.
This man is a veteran of the war against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was twice injured there and suffered a concussion, he added.
The grenade he was brandishing was real, the police chief said, according to which the man faces up to 15 years in prison.
He will undergo a psychiatric examination, Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky said on Facebook.
The assailant did not put forward concrete demands and simply said "to be fed up with his life", explained Denys Klymenko quoted by the Interfax-Ukraine agency.
A local elected official, Vassyl Olekssiouk, friend of the madman who led the negotiations, indicated that the suspect had left the army for several years and worked in a mechanical workshop.
He was in a difficult financial situation.
"You don't react to anything"
A video of a witness, posted online, showed the individual at the entrance to the building holding an object in his hand that he threatened to detonate, proclaiming in particular "I will not get out of here alive".
The man, who appears to be in his forties, introduced himself as "a former minesweeper" as people present tried to calm him down.
“This is a seizure of the building by force,” he cried.
“You don't react to anything!
The man had added, annoying the calm of the passers-by in the hall and multiplying the vulgarities.
Incidents involving weapons are relatively common in Ukraine, where many of them originate from the area of conflict with separatists, a war that has claimed more than 13,000 lives since its outbreak in 2014.
In July 2020, a maniac had taken a bus with 13 passengers hostage for twelve hours.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former actor, had accepted a strange request from the kidnapper to resolve the crisis: he had posted a video on Facebook in which he recommended watching a documentary on the mistreatment of animals.
