An armed man in Ukraine armed with an automatic rifle and grenades turned himself in to police and released 13 hostages after the country’s president accepted his demand to recommend the 2005 film Earthlings starring Joaquin Phoenix.
The niche film’s recommendation, delivered by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy via Facebook, helped end an hour-long clash in the western Ukraine city of Lutsk, where Maksym Kryvosh, 44, took a bus and demanded that dozens of government officials admit to being “terrorists.”
During the hostage crisis, which started Tuesday morning, Kryvosh opened fire and threw a grenade at a police drone. Reports of automatic shooting sent some journalists to the scene to seek refuge. No one was seriously injured during the confrontation, although a bullet was reported to have nearly lost the national police chief.
The gunman also spoke to journalists and monitored social media during the hostage crisis, although his Twitter account was deactivated. A hostage, who spoke to a journalist on the phone during the crisis, begged them to put the gunman in contact with the president’s office.
Zelenskiy spoke directly to Kryvosh, a spokeswoman said, after which three of the hostages were released from the bus. The rest were released shortly after I posted a short online video about a critical Joaquin Phoenix movie about mistreatment of animals.
“The 2005 Earthlings movie. Everyone should see it,” Zelenskiy said in the video posted on Facebook. It was removed after Kryvosh surrendered and replaced with a note thanking the police and others who helped end the hostage crisis.
“Human life is the most important value. We have not lost anyone, “wrote Zelenskiy.
Kryvosh is an animal rights activist, local media reported. He had also spent almost a decade in prison on fraud and weapons charges and was described by the police as “unstable” after the incident.
Kryvosh, with an automatic rifle and a beret, wrote a manifesto of more than 500 pages and issued an anti-government rule shortly before boarding the bus in Lutsk on Tuesday and told police that he had manipulated it with explosives.
On Tuesday afternoon, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said: “The movie … is good. And you don’t have to be so screwed up and cause so much horror across the country, you can watch it without it.”
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