OF COURSE IT WAS: Ukraine’s leader calls killing of Putin critic a Russian terror act.

A former Russian lawmaker and Kremlin critic who fled to Ukraine last year was shot dead Thursday in Kiev — a killing that Ukraine’s President called a “Russian state terrorist act.”

Denis Voronenkov, who’d been a Communist member of Russia’s lower legislative house before he left, was fatally shot outside a hotel in broad daylight, officials said.

Voronenkov becomes the latest in a string of Russian critics of President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government who were killed or injured in mysterious circumstances.

Vladimir Lenin — the founder of the Soviet Union which taught Putin to be the “sword and shield” of the State — said, “The purpose of terrorism is to terrify.”