Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukraine orchestrated an attack on the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula that killed a high-ranking Russian naval officer, sources in Ukraine’s security services told the AFP and Reuters news agencies Wednesday. The killing, which was confirmed by Moscow, is the latest in a string of targeted attacks on Russian military officers and pro-Kremlin public figures in occupied Ukrainian territory and within Russia.
A source in the Security Service of Ukraine told AFP it had orchestrated a car bomb attack in the city of Sevastopol that killed senior naval officer Valery Trankovsky, a first rank captain in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
“As a result of the explosion, the Russian captain’s legs were blown off and he died of blood loss,” the source added in written comments. It described Trankovsky as “war criminal” responsible for the launch of cruise missiles from the Black Sea at civilian targets in Ukraine.
The car exploded and caught fire in the city’s eastern Gagarin district around 2 a.m. Eastern, the Russian-installed Sevastopol governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said.
“As a result of an improvised explosive device fixed to the bottom of the car exploding, a Russian armed forces serviceman was killed,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement after the incident, without naming Trankovsky.
They said they had opened an investigation into “the fact of committing a terrorist attack.”
A witness who spoke to the Moskovsky Komsomolets tabloid said the driver was thrown by the impact on to the passenger seat and “everyone realized immediately that he had been blown up.”
“The explosives had been placed on the side of the driver’s seat,” the unnamed woman said, adding that the car had been moving at the time of the blast.
Shrapnel from the explosion hit several other vehicles but no one was injured, the witness added.
In October, Ukraine claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack that killed an official at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. In April, a car bomb in Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine’s eastern Lugansk region killed a Moscow-appointed government official.
Wednesday’s blast in Crimea came as Russia targeted Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with a salvo of dozens of missiles and drones, many of which the Ukrainian military said were it had downed. It also came as the U.S. and South Korea said North Korean soldiers had joined in active combat alongside Russian troops trying to repel Ukraine’s months-old incursion into the far western Russian region of Kursk.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson said Tuesday that “most” of the roughly 10,000 North Korean soldiers sent to Russia had been deployed in Kursk and “begun engaging in combat operations with Russian forces.”
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