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Mayor Who Was Shot Was Colorful and Powerful, Loved and Loathed
(about 9 hours later)
DONETSK, Ukraine — Unidentified gunmen opened fire Monday on the mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, seriously wounding him with at least one bullet to the back while he was riding a bicycle near a major highway, municipal officials said. The attempted assassination shifted the crisis in the east of the country onto new and perilous ground.
KHARKIV, Ukraine — Fed up with the lifeless and unflattering photographs taken of him by press photographers, Gennady A. Kernes, the mayor of Kharkiv, decided to take matters into his own hands.
The mayor, Gennady A. Kernes, had been regarded as seeking to steer a middle course as pro-Russian militants conduct a campaign of occupations of key facilities in eastern cities. That campaign is widely believed to be aimed at drawing the region deeper into Moscow’s orbit or prompting a Russian intervention similar to the events that led to the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea last month.
He and his staff created an Instagram account that presented Mr. Kernes the way he wanted to be seen: flexing shirtless in the gym, cuddling some of his 27 dogs and assorted birds and other animals, and bathing in an ice-cold nature preserve as he flashed a trademark peace sign.
Municipal officials said that the gunmen shot Mr. Kernes around 12 p.m. local time and that he was undergoing surgery for life-threatening injuries. No arrests were reported.
He was running during his cross-fit training regimen in a city park on Monday when a would-be assassin’s bullet tore through his chest, missing his heart by millimeters and leaving Mr. Kernes fighting for his life at a hospital. He survived surgery but remained unconscious and in critical condition Monday night. No arrests were made.
The mayor’s death would be the first assassination of a major politician in the east and present a new challenge to the interim authorities in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, who have seemed largely powerless to dislodge pro-Russian militants and regain control of the east.
It may never be known who shot Mr. Kernes in the back. Municipal officials and a member of his security detail said Mr. Kernes was struck by a sniper’s bullet fired from a considerable distance. An unabashed critic of both sides in eastern Ukraine’s simmering conflict, he had plenty of enemies.
Mr. Kernes has said he supports a united Ukraine and opposes Russian intervention. In a terse announcement, the mayor’s official website said, “Today, at about 12:00 there was an assassination attempt against Gennady Kernes.”
But whoever fired it, the shot that almost killed Mr. Kernes may yet prove fatal to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, as it seeks to maintain a fragile political balance in the weeks ahead without his guiding hand.
Mr. Kernes, who has dominated politics in the city for several years, is regarded as an eccentric figure who has spoken publicly against separatism while bitterly criticizing the authorities in Kiev.
Kharkiv, a city with a large Russian-speaking population, lies 20 miles from the border with Russia. Its police forces have so far managed to prevent separatists or anti-government militias from establishing an armed foothold and declaring the province independent.
Broadening the web of his allegiances, Mr. Kernes was also seen as a supporter of the deposed president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. Officials said he was shot while riding a bicycle as part of a fitness regime; another account said he was shot while bathing at a mineral spring. Both accounts said he was shot in the back and seriously injured.
Mr. Kernes, a colorful and powerful figure who has dominated politics in Kharkiv for several years, has played a large role in keeping things relatively quiet in the city. “He is the real boss, the guarantor of stability,” Mikhail Dobkin, a presidential candidate and a close friend of Mr. Kernes’s since they met in 1998, said in a telephone interview.
Earlier this year, Mr. Kernes rushed to calm pro-Russian activists calling for secession; appeared as a mediator in a shootout where a 19-year-old pro-Russian militant was killed; and met privately with representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the 57-nation group — including Russia and Ukraine — that has sent monitors to the country.
Formerly allied with the deposed president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, Mr. Kernes has charted a middle way, attacking the fledgling, revolutionary government in Kiev but calling for the country to remain united in the face of a possible Russian attack. In other words, among the inert or downright rebellious elected politicians in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Kernes is what passes for an ally to Kiev these days.
He has also accused senior officials in Kiev of pursuing political retribution and has called the new government tyrannical and illegitimate.
Mr. Kernes is Jewish, though there are no indications that anti-Semitism played any role in the attack. A friend of Mr. Dobkin who replaced him as acting mayor in Kharkiv in 2007, the mayor is seen as canny political operator who is not shy about expressing himself.
“People ask if I like the new authorities, but I prefer a different question: Does the new government actually like our people, with their demands, their desires, their dreams?” Mr. Kernes said in an interview last month in a restaurant at the downtown hotel he owns.
When Mr. Dobkin tried to shoot a campaign video for his run for governor in 2007, Mr. Kernes was standing behind the camera, bullying Mr. Dobkin with expletive-laced abuse.
“Here we have an acting president,” Mr. Kernes said, referring to the interim president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov. “In Russia, they have a president. There they don’t have political chaos, and here what do we see? Political chaos.”
“You have a boring face,” Mr. Kernes told Mr. Dobkin at one point. “Nobody will give you money.”
The mayor has a lavish lifestyle and is closely allied with Mikhail M. Dobkin, a former regional governor and now a presidential candidate accused by the authorities in Kiev of “threatening the territorial integrity” of Ukraine.
On Monday, Mr. Dobkin called the shooting of Mr. Kernes a deeply worrying step in the instability gripping the country’s east, saying, “Now we are seeing the blacker things in life.”
Kharkiv, a city with a large Russian-speaking population, lies 20 miles from the border with Russia.
Although considered an ally of Kiev, Mr. Kernes does not enjoy the warmest of relations with the capital. Arsen Avakov, a political rival of Mr. Kernes’s from Kharkiv and now the country’s interim interior minister, has backed the prosecution of Mr. Kernes on suspicion of murder and kidnapping, charges that the mayor has called politically motivated.
Konstantinovka became the latest city to fall in eastern Ukraine when militants raised the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic above the city administration building on Monday morning. Fewer than a dozen armed men, wearing camouflage and black masks and carrying rifles and a grenade launcher, guarded the building’s entrance here as a work crew erected barricades along the sidewalk.
In an interview in March, Mr. Kernes said he believed that the new government in Kiev was fueling disillusionment in the east and was apathetic about the interests of local people.
“We want a referendum,” the group’s commander said, declining to give his name.
Yet he also said that he believed the political crisis in Ukraine would subside after the referendum for the peninsula of Crimea to secede from Ukraine. That was March 16, and things have only grown worse in the east, where pro-Russian separatists have seized public buildings in at least 10 cities.
The seizure of this industrial city on the road between Slovyansk, the antigovernment militia’s center, and Donetsk, the regional capital, signaled a further enfeebling of the interim government in Kiev and apparent growing irrelevance of a diplomatic agreement reached in Geneva earlier this month aimed at defusing the situation. The forces encountered no resistance from either the local police or residents, and their ranks consisted mostly of middle-aged men. Within hours of taking control, a dump truck and a crane had arrived to help build fortifications.
In the interview, Mr. Kernes spoke in a small dining room in the National Hotel, where he has lived for the last seven years, and which his bodyguards keep under round-the-clock protection.
Dozens of residents readily enlisted in a newly formed city self-defense force, signing their names while Soviet-era rock anthems blared from speakers on the building’s steps. The gunmen milled freely about the crowd, crouching at times to tie pro-Russian ribbons on children’s arms.
Mr. Kernes seemed exhausted discussing the dire political situation in Kharkiv, but brightened when asked about the photographs he is best known for on social networks.
“I’m unarmed, but if I need to, I’ll take up a gun in five minutes and shoot till the last bullet,” said Vladimir P. Kostilyov, 63, a local pensioner. “If they don’t start listening to my voice, they will start hearing the sound of a rifle in my hands.”
“Of all the mayors, my Instagram account is the best,” he said, and then asked a bodyguard to lead out a purebred dog that also lived in the hotel.
Negotiations for the release of a European military observer team held by militants in Slovyansk resumed on Monday with the return to the city of diplomats from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Since the interview, as a wave of political turmoil has gripped eastern Ukraine, cities close to Kharkiv have slipped from Kiev’s control.
Eight European officers, led by a German colonel, and five members of the Ukrainian military were detained on Friday by gunmen at a checkpoint south of Slovyansk. The city’s de facto authorities have accused them of spying. The self-appointed mayor of Slovyansk on Sunday released one member of the team, a Swedish major suffering from diabetes, but has declined to release the others and said he seeks a prisoner exchange.
“Every time that we think we have hit bottom, something comes knocking from down below,” Tatyana Gruzinskaya, a personal aide to Mr. Kernes, said in the March interview.
The German government on Monday called for the immediate release of the detained observers. The men were being “held captive against every right and without any reason,” Steffen Seibert, a government spokesman, told reporters at a news conference in Berlin. He appealed to Russia to “clearly” distance itself from such acts.
On Monday, Ms. Gruzinskaya stood outside the hospital where Mr. Kernes underwent a two-hour operation to repair damage to his lungs and remained under anesthesia in the evening.
Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, spoke by telephone on Monday with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, to demand that Russian leaders “set a clear signal that what has happened to the foreign O.S.C.E. observers in Slovyansk is unacceptable,” Mr. Steinmeier’s spokesman, Martin Schäfer, told reporters.
Death threats had been piling up, she said, but he had not changed his routine of running or biking the city streets in the mornings.
“We cannot recognize that their commitments have led to any results,” Mr. Schäfer said. He rejected as “totally absurd” allegations from pro-Russian separatists that the military team was involved in espionage. “Their work is entirely transparent. It has nothing to do with espionage. It is the exact opposite,” he said.
“He likes to run in the city, to show that he is out there,” Ms. Gruzinskaya said.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen canceled a planned two-day trip to Kosovo on Monday, instead heading to the military installation in western Germany where the observers who were arrested are based to discuss the status of the detainees and their mission.
“I would never have called him a very careful person,” she added. “He has been like this since I met him.”
In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that the West should be far more concerned about the buildup of Ukrainian military forces in the east of the country rather than the actions of the self-defense units, a reference to the separatists.
Among other issues, said the statement posted on the ministry’s website, the deployment should “raise deep concern” about implementing the Geneva agreement.
Given the military heft of the various units, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe should pay attention to “the possibility of indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force, including the destruction of entire cities,” read the statement.
The Russian Foreign Ministry made no mention of the group of observers affiliated with the O.S.C.E. held by pro-Russian militants in Slovyansk.
Ukraine has deployed 11,000 troops operating in the area, plus 160 tanks, 230 armored personnel carriers, at least 150 artillery systems and “a large number of planes,” the statement said.
“The number and composition of this group significantly outnumbers local self-defense units,” it said, adding that Moscow was prepared to discuss military aspects of the crisis.
Military analysts have said that Ukraine was gradually shifting its armed forces eastward both to try to address the unrest there and in response to the military maneuvers taking place on the Russian side of the border. The Ukrainian military numbers about 70,000 troops.
Previously in Crimea, Russia first announced that its citizens there were under the threat of violence before deploying elite soldiers and eventually annexing the peninsula. Incidents of violence against Russians in Crimea were never independently confirmed.
