Kyiv: Well-known Ukrainian actor Pasha Lee, who rose to stardom in Europe with his part in the 2016 action comedy "Selfie Party", has been killed in Russian shelling in the town of Irpin, media reports said on Wednesday.
The 33-year-old Crimea-born actor died in Irpin, located to the northwest of capital Kyiv, on March 6 while defending the town as one of the many civilians who picked up the gun and joined the ranks of soldiers in Ukraine after the Russian military invasion.
He was part of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine or the military reserve.
Pasha was born as Pavlo Romanovych Lee was widely known on Ukrainian television and was featured in a bunch of shows and movies such as Oleksii Shaparev's “The Fight Rules” and Lyubomyr Levytsky's “Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors” among many others, the reports said.
Apart from his acting role, Lee was also a popular host of the Ukrainian entertainment programme 'Day At Home'.
The actor's death was confirmed by both the President of Ukraine's National Union of Journalists, Sergiy Tomilenko, and the Odessa International Film Festival.
Lee had been posting several updates on Instagram since joining the Ukrainian armed forces.
In a translated post on Saturday, just a day before his death, he wrote: “For the last 48 hours there is an opportunity to sit down and take a picture of how we are being bombed, and we are smiling because we will manage..."
Several fans, followers and colleagues paid their tribute to the late actor. Netizens called him an angel. (UNI)
