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Ukrainian activist and volunteer Serhii Sternenko has been injured in an attack, he said in a post on Telegram on May 1.
Sternenko said his life is not in danger and that the attacker has been detained.
"They operated on me. The bullet went through. It didn’t hit anything vital. I'm trying to get my head straight… I'm very lucky the injury turned out this way," he posted on Telegram.
"Russians are f**kers," he wrote, adding: "I am grateful to the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) for their quick response. If not for them, I wouldn’t be able to write anything anymore. They quite literally saved my life."
According to the SBU, the attack on Sternenko was an attempted assassination involving a firearm. It wasn't specified where or when the attack took place.
Serhii Sternenko, 30, is a prominent Kyiv-based activist also known for helping the military. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, he has played a key role in popularizing first-person-view (FPV) drones, raising funds to supply them and other equipment to the front lines. In January, he launched the Sternenko Community Foundation.
The foundation claims to be the largest non-governmental supplier of FPV drones, having purchased more than 176,000 of them as of May 1.
Sternenko also runs a YouTube channel, with over 2 million subscribers, and his Telegram channel has over 840,000 readers.
Sternenko has faced attacks in the past. In one of the three incidents when Sternenko was attacked, the activist inflicted a fatal injury to an attacker in 2018 whilst protecting himself and his girlfriend, according to his lawyer Illia Vorobiov.
It is unclear to this day who had organized the attack that appeared to be an attempt to silence Sternenko, an active participant during the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and a vocal critic of local authorities in Odesa, Vorobiov added.
In December 2023, an Odesa court closed a case against Sternenko for the death of a man who attacked him in 2018.
Abbey Fenbert
