Lawmaker Andrii Ivanchuk dies at 50.

Andrii Ivanchuk, a member of the Ukrainian parliament since 2012, died overnight on Sept.

25, the parliament's chairman, Ruslan Stefanchuk announced. "Today at night, People's Deputy of Ukraine of the 7th, 8th, and 9th convocations Andrii Ivanchuk passed away," Stefanchuk wrote on social media. "My sincere condolences to the relatives and friends over this premature death."

Although the cause of death was not publicly announced, Ukrainska Pravda reported that the People's Deputy died due to health complications related to a blood clot. Ivanchuk was born on June 16, 1973, in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk. He was first elected to the Verkhovna Rada, the country's parliament, in 2012 with the All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" party of Yuliia Tymoshenko.

He then entered the People's Front party of Ukraine's former Prime Minister Andrii  Yatseniuk in 2014 and later joined the parliamentary faction Trust in 2019. The lawmaker was linked with several corruption scandals. In 2016, he traveled from Kyiv to Nice on a private Gulfstream-200 plane at a price he was unlikely to have been able to afford with his salary at the time.

A year later, investigative journalists also linked Ivanchuk to a scheme involving a forced seizure of real estate in the center of Kyiv.

Former governor of Kherson Oblast Hennadii Lahuta dies at 49 Hennadii Lahuta, former head of the Kherson Oblast State Administration, has died at the age of 49, Kherson Oblast Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported on Sept.

17.

News Editor

Martin Fornusek is a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. He has previously worked as a news content editor at the media company Newsmatics and is a contributor to Euromaidan Press.

He also volunteers as an editor and translator at the Czech-language version of Ukrainer.

Martin studied at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, holding a bachelor's degree in security studies and history and a master's degree in conflict and democracy studies.