The Kyiv Tragedy, Gun Rights and Police Escape: Three Dimensions of a Single Issue

April 18, 2026. Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv. Six dead, over fifteen wounded, including children. An armed man opens fire on people, barricades himself inside a building, and takes hostages. The killer’s weapon – officially registered. All permits – in order. The verdict on the debate over liberalizing the firearms market was delivered by reality itself, before the ink had dried on the gun legalization bills.

There is, however, a detail that gives pause – both in scale and in symbolism. This tragedy, by the calendar, preceded the beginning of the American Revolution by a single day. Yes, it was on April 19, 1775 – exactly 251 years ago – that the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord. Armed citizens who refused to surrender their weapons to British soldiers opened a new chapter in the world history of democracy.

Between the two dates – April 18 and April 19 – lies a chasm of two and a half centuries and an abyss of meaning. But there is also a common thread: the question of who controls weapons in a society, and what price ordinary citizens pay for that. This thread is just as relevant today as it was 251 years ago.

THE STATISTICS IT IS CONVENIENT TO IGNORE

The debate over opening the firearms market during a full-scale war is, to put it mildly, absurd — not because it is the ‘wrong’ topic, but because the answer has already been written by reality, encoded in official police statistics that people prefer not to read. Let us look at the numbers.

The data reveal two distinct cycles of violence separated by a pre-war low. The first peak falls in 2014 (2,523 proceedings) – the year of Crimea’s annexation and the start of the armed conflict in the East: a sharp saturation of weapons, disorganization of law enforcement, and collapse of unified command. The following years show a gradual normalization – through to the 2021 minimum (300 proceedings). These figures should be treated as the baseline for comparison.

The full-scale invasion of 2022 produced a new spike: +543% relative to 2021 in the very first year (1,929 proceedings). A critical detail: the proportion of suspicion notices to total proceedings in 2022–2023 collapsed to 25–27% (compared to 77–86% in peacetime). This means the majority of cases were opened without identified suspects – a direct consequence of uncontrolled weapons proliferation and overburdened investigators. The positive trend of 2024–2025 (declining to 821–832 proceedings) reflects system adaptation, but the level remains twice the pre-war baseline.

This table records an even more alarming dynamic.

While the overall number of firearm-related crimes in 2022–2023 primarily reflected the chaos of the first months of the invasion, the homicide statistics point to a qualitatively different process. The year 2023 is the absolute peak across all 13 years of observation: 909 intentional firearm homicides – 25 times the 2021 minimum (36).

The most telling indicator is clearance. In 2023, it fell to 19%: only 173 of 909 cases had an identified suspect. In practical terms, 736 intentional homicides went unsolved within a single calendar year. For comparison: in 2018–2021, clearance rates stood at 90–98%. The recovery seen in 2024–2025 (52–64%) is a positive trend, yet it remains at least twice below peacetime levels. This means a significant share of those who committed firearm homicides during the active phase of the conflict remains unpunished – and continues to live in society.

AND THEN THE VIDEO APPEARS

And then a video appears that cannot be ignored.

During the terrorist attack in Kyiv, individuals in patrol police uniforms, upon hearing gunshots, simply fled – leaving civilians without protection. The recording shows a child forced to save herself on her own. The footage was published by TSN and Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. The officers have been suspended from duty. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko has ordered a disciplinary investigation.

Declarations are good. But the question is not what the minister said this morning. The question is what happens after the investigation concludes – assuming guilt is established and the authenticity of the recordings is confirmed. If police leadership fails to demonstrate a genuine response – not a declarative one, but one with concrete disciplinary consequences – the problem will intensify. Not because ‘the police are bad,’ but because institutional silence following such a video legitimizes conduct incompatible with the status of a law enforcement officer.

Among a segment of Ukrainian police officers, a dangerous attitude has taken hold during the full-scale war. Wartime, where violence is normalized, only reinforces the self-preservation reflex – at the expense of the protection reflex. Fleeing a shooter is not the cowardice of individuals. It is a symptom of systemic institutional degradation that cannot be fixed by a single disciplinary inquiry.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: WHAT THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS ACTUALLY GAVE

Let us return to the symbolism of the date.

April 19, 1775 – the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The first shots of the American Revolution. The shot heard round the world. And a few years later, the first modern constitutional democracy was born.

The right to bear arms did not merely allow Americans to win the War of Independence. It structured American democracy for two and a half centuries and embedded at its core the principle that an armed citizen is a subject, not an object, of power. This principle was enshrined in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution (1791): “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

American statistics demonstrate the obvious: high firearms saturation correlates with higher rates of firearm-related crime. 79% of intentional homicides in the United States involve a firearm. In EU countries, that figure ranges from 20% to 40%. The American model is not a template to emulate in a criminological sense. But it is a template in a constitutional-democratic sense: the right to self-defense as the foundation of the relationship between citizen and state.

It is important to distinguish two levels of debate. The first is criminological: more guns = more of certain categories of crime. The statistics confirm this, and to deny it is to ignore reality. The second is constitutional-democratic: the right of an armed citizen as a deterrent against state arbitrariness and as the basis of popular sovereignty. These two levels do not contradict each other – they describe different dimensions of the same reality.

UKRAINE TODAY: A SOCIETY WITH WEAPONS IN HAND

Ukraine today is a society in which millions of citizens, weapons in hand, are defending the state from destruction. By estimates, as of 2025, between 6 and 10 million units of various types of weapons are in civilian circulation – including among demobilized soldiers and veterans. Some are legally registered. Some are not. This is a fact that must be lived with.

The gravest threat lies ahead. Hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers are returning from the front. Some with untreated PTSD. Some with weapons, legally or not. The experience of other conflicts – Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Balkans – shows that crime rates among veterans do not rise immediately, but rather 2–3 years after demobilization. That wave has not yet arrived. And if the state does not prepare, the police statistics of 2027–2028 will become the subject of parliamentary inquiries, not academic articles.

The question is not whether to ‘legalize or not.’ The question is what institutional culture we are building around this reality – and whether the state is capable of the accountability that follows from it.

INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION: THE STATE THAT DOES NOT PROTECT — AND THE CITIZEN WHO PROTECTS HIMSELF

The American Revolution began because the state failed to protect its citizens – and so they took up arms themselves. The Kyiv tragedy of April 18, 2026 – and especially the video of officers fleeing a shooter while leaving a child at the center of the gunfire – is a painful reminder that this question remains very much alive today.

A police officer who flees a shooter and abandons a child to their fate is not merely a disciplinary matter. It is a symptom. A state that wishes to grant its citizens the right to bear arms – or that has already done so de facto, having distributed millions of weapons in the first days of the invasion – must first demonstrate that it itself knows how to handle weapons responsibly and protect those who protect it.

The statistics are incontrovertible: the full-scale war produced a sharp spike in firearm-related crime – +543% in the first year alone. But those same statistics show that in 2024–2025, the numbers began to fall. This means that society and the state are adapting. The question is: in which direction. Toward the rule of law and institutional accountability – or toward the normalization of impunity, in which police officers flee and killers remain unidentified.