Gunman kills six in Kyiv supermarket attack after hostage standoff

A gunman who killed four people on a Kyiv street and then took a hostage inside a supermarket was shot dead after police negotiated with him for about 40 minutes, leaving six dead and about 10 others injured or hospitalized in the capital’s Holosiivskyi district.

Ukrainian officials said the attack began in the street, where the gunman opened fire on bystanders before entering a nearby supermarket. Inside, he killed a fifth person and held a hostage as police special tactical units and negotiators moved in. A female police negotiator tried to speak to him from behind an armored vehicle before the operation ended with officers storming the building and shooting him dead.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko later said a woman in her 30s died in hospital from her injuries, raising the death toll to six. Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said the gunman had been born in 1968, and other reporting identified him as a 58-year-old native of Moscow who later obtained Ukrainian citizenship. Ukrainian officials also said he had lived in Bakhmut before moving to Kyiv and that he possessed a legally registered weapon.

The attack carried a grim distinction in a country where civilian life has already been reshaped by Russia’s full-scale invasion. Officials described the shooting as rare for Ukraine, with no comparable mass shooting since 2022. That made the scene in Holosiivskyi district stand out not as a battlefield episode but as a hostage crisis and mass killing in the middle of the capital, far from the front line.

The response also highlighted the strain on Ukraine’s internal security apparatus as war continues. Police negotiated with the gunman, deployed tactical units and tried to resolve the standoff without more bloodshed, but the attack still ended with multiple dead, wounded civilians and a supermarket turned into a crime scene. For a city already living under wartime pressure, the shooting reinforced how vulnerable ordinary people remain even in areas not directly hit by combat.