A petition with a proposal to posthumously award Iryna Farion the title of Hero of Ukraine will be considered at a meeting of the award commission of the Ministry of Education and Science. This is stated in Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal’s response to the petition, which has collected the required number of signatures on the Cabinet of Ministers’ website.
“…We would like to inform you that, according to the Ministry of Education and Science, your electronic petition will be considered at a meeting of the award commission of the said ministry,” the response reads.
Shmyhal explained that candidates for the title of Hero of Ukraine should be nominated at their place of work.
Farion worked as a lecturer at Lviv Polytechnic National University, which is subordinated to the Ministry of Education.
Earlier, the initiators listed the achievements of Iryna Farion. In particular:
- the linguist launched the project to promote Ukrainian books “From Book to Goal” (2011-2019);
- launched the television cultural project “Greatness of a Personality” to promote prominent figures of Ukraine;
- launched the intellectual and cultural television project “Gene of Ukrainians” on the NTA TV channel;
- she has published 7 single monographs, 8 co-authored monographs and more than 400 articles in Ukrainian and foreign publications;
- it was Iryna Farion who initiated a petition to the Constitutional Court regarding the unconstitutionality of the adoption of Putin’s language law “On the Principles of State Language Policy” by Kolesnichenko and Kivalov on 3 July 2012 in the Verkhovna Rada. The Constitutional Court of Ukraine cancelled the law.
What is known about the murder of Irina Farion
On Friday, 19 July, a political activist and professor at Lviv Polytechnic, Iryna Farion, was assassinated on Masaryk Street in Lviv. An unknown person attacked her, shooting her in the head. Farion was taken to hospital, where her condition was assessed as a deep brain coma. An hour after her admission, doctors pronounced her dead.
The crime was reclassified as a premeditated murder, and the Lviv police launched an investigation. A large number of police officers were involved, as well as operatives and investigators from Kyiv. Several examinations were carried out, including a ballistic one.
The All-Ukrainian Union ‘Svoboda’ even offered a financial reward of USD 10,000 for information that would help find the attacker of Iryna Farion. Thousands of people gathered at the funeral of the public figure, which took place on 22 July.
Currently, the main suspect in the murder is a young man who had been watching Farion near her home and had been preparing for the assassination attempt for a month. However, information appeared on Russian social media that Russian “national socialists” from the NS/WP movement claimed responsibility for the murder.
The investigation into the murder of Iryna Farion is currently ongoing, and an important aspect is to identify possible customers.