A child, a woman and two police officers were killed after a Mercedes drove into a pedestrian underpass

In Kyiv, police are investigating a fatal road traffic accident in the Solomianskyi district, in which four people were killed and three others were injured.

The crash occurred at around 17:30 on Chokolivskyi Boulevard, near the intersection of Vadym Hetman and Ushynskyi streets. According to preliminary information from law enforcement, a 49-year-old Mercedes driver was traveling at high speed, lost control and drove onto a pedestrian area near an underpass. As a result of the collision, a 12-year-old boy, a 47-year-old woman and two police officers who were on duty were killed. According to the National Police, the deceased officers were Senior Lieutenant Dmytro Bondarchuk and Lieutenant Denys Budchenko.

Two men and a woman were also injured and are in hospital. The Mercedes driver himself also suffered serious injuries and was hospitalized in intensive care. After the crash, rescuers extricated the man from the mangled vehicle and handed him over to medical personnel. Investigators have opened a criminal proceeding over the fatal crash under Part 3 of Article 286 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine – violation of traffic safety rules or vehicle operation by persons operating vehicles, if this caused the death of several persons.

Law enforcement detained the driver in accordance with Article 208 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine. He is in intensive care under police guard. The question of notifying him of suspicion is currently being decided. According to the Office of the Prosecutor General, the driver had previously been repeatedly held administratively liable for speeding. He was also involved in four traffic accidents, two of which occurred in 2026.

Information has appeared online that the likely Mercedes driver may be Pavlo Pleshivtsev, born in 1976, who is associated with the religious community of Evangelical Christian Baptists “Church of the village Pidstepne”. At the same time, official law enforcement agencies did not name him in the cited reports.

This tragedy once again raises the painful issue of accountability for systematic violations of traffic rules. If a driver accumulates fines for years, gets into accidents, but continues to get behind the wheel, society ultimately receives not just “another crash”, but dead children, random passersby and police officers who were doing their jobs.

Earlier we wrote:

• In Kyiv a drunk unlicensed driver struck a patrol officer
• A police officer was killed after crashing into a Toyota that was stopped after an accident
• Fatal collision near a store: a female pedestrian died at the scene
• Accident on the Mykolaiv highway: a truck collided with a minibus – a man died
• Tragic crash in the Mykolaiv region: driver killed, passengers and an infant injured