The day a grenade reached Kyiv's Cabinet building
A look back at 4 August 2021, when a security scare in the Ukrainian capital unfolded alongside a Belarusian athlete's asylum drama.
What happened on 4 August 2021 in the heart of Ukraine's government quarter? Police in Kyiv arrested a man who had entered the Cabinet of Ministers building carrying a grenade and threatening to detonate it.
The reports from that day describe the arrest as the outcome of the incident: a man with a grenade inside the building that houses the Ukrainian Cabinet, and police who took him into custody. Nothing in the reports of the day points to further details, and this review does not add any.
A parallel story with a Ukrainian link
The same days carried another story with a Ukrainian thread. On 2 August 2021, Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya entered the Polish embassy in Tokyo. She had refused to board a flight to Belarus at Haneda Airport and had asked Japanese police for protection. Her husband had left Belarus and entered Ukraine.
The Japanese government said it would take measures to protect her stay, while several European countries offered her asylum. The Tokyo Games, postponed from 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, ran from 23 July to 8 August 2021.
Later, Belarus, along with Russia, was barred from the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That lay in the future on 4 August 2021.
Taken together, the two stories show how a single early-August day could bring a security alarm to Kyiv's institutions while Ukraine also appeared in a neighbouring country's human story.
