Allied Intelligence Services — 2026-04-19

SBU reclassifies Kyiv Holosiivskyi supermarket shooting as a terrorist act; DBR opens police-negligence probe

The State Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal proceeding under Part 3 of Article 258 of the Criminal Code (terrorist act resulting in death) over the April 18 shooting spree in Kyiv's Holosiivskyi district that killed six. President Zelensky said the attacker was a 58-year-old Russian-born man with long residence in Donetsk who killed four on the street and one hostage inside a Velmart supermarket before KORD special forces killed him. The DBR opened a parallel service-negligence case examining police conduct at the scene. The head of the Patrol Police, Zhukov, resigned. The reclassification moves the case into the SBU terrorism-investigation stack.

Analysis
The terrorism reclassification under Article 258(3), sources converging, is primarily a legal instrument: it unlocks broader SBU compulsory-process authorities and compels the DBR to preserve police-response evidence whose political sensitivity Zhukov's 24-hour resignation has already confirmed. The attacker's Russian birth and Donetsk residence keeps an FSB/GRU-tasking hypothesis live without yet committing to it, since naming external direction would require intercept or captured communications not yet surfaced. The Russian origin may be incidental to a lone radicalized actor, and the terrorism framing may reflect investigative option-preservation rather than preliminary attribution. With moderate confidence, within 30 days the SBU will either publish a Russian-service attribution or quietly settle the case as criminal terrorism without external tasking, and the evidentiary direction will likely become visible first through DBR parallel case filings rather than SBU public statements.

4 sources