(Kyiv) Ukraine claimed responsibility on Wednesday for the car bomb assassination of Mikhail Filiponenko, a deputy and former senior military official in the Ukrainian region of Luhansk (east) under Russian occupation.
“The special operation to liquidate the executioner Filiponenko was carried out jointly with representatives of the Ukrainian resistance movement” in this area, said the military intelligence services (GUR) within the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
Mr. Filiponenko was “involved in organizing torture chambers” for Ukrainian “prisoners of war and civilians” in the occupied part of the Luhansk region and “personally” participated in torture, the GUR accused on Telegram.
Ukrainian intelligence thus launched a threat of “retaliation” against “all war criminals and collaborators”.
Earlier in the day, Russian media and officials reported the death of Mikhail Filiponenko in the explosion of his vehicle in Luhansk.
The Russian Investigative Committee released images showing a 4X4 vehicle with blown out windows and a crushed left-front door, with traces of a red liquid visible on the rear door.
An investigation was opened for a “terrorist act”, according to this source.
The head of the occupation administration of the Luhansk region, Leonid Passetchnik, praised on Telegram the memory of a “real man” who, according to him, still had “many plans” to “develop” the region under occupation.
Another local MP in this occupied region, Yuri Yurov, claimed on Telegram that Mikhail Filiponenko had already been targeted by a bomb attack in Luhansk against his vehicle on February 21, 2022.
He emerged alive “by a miracle” from this explosion, according to this source, and only his driver was injured.
Mikhail Filiponenko was one of the founders of the Luhansk separatist army in 2014, at the start of the war between Kyiv and these pro-Russian troops supported by Moscow.
The four Ukrainian territories that Moscow claims to annex (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhia) are regularly affected by attacks, sometimes fatal, targeting officials of the Russian occupation administration.
Several assassinations or attempted assassinations have been attributed by the Russian authorities to Ukraine since the February 2022 offensive. Before this date, the territories under pro-Russian control in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk had also already been affected by regulations of deadly accounts between separatists.
Last week, the Russian security services (FSB) accused Kyiv of being behind the assassination attempt at the end of October in Crimea of a former Ukrainian deputy who had defected to Russia, Oleg Tsariov.
Three dead in Russian strike on eastern Ukraine
Three people were killed by a Russian strike on a house in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities announced Wednesday.
The attack hit the small village of Bagatir, located not far from the front in this area where fighting is raging, said the Ukrainian State Emergency Situations Service (DSNS).
Three bodies – those of a woman and two men – were pulled from the rubble of the house, he added on Telegram.
In images published by the authorities, rescuers search what remains of a collapsed building and pull out a body.
The day before, the Russian occupation authorities had claimed that six people had died in a Ukrainian strike in Donetsk, the regional capital under Russian control.
The Donetsk region is one of four Ukrainian provinces whose annexation Moscow claimed following the launch of the Russian offensive in February 2022.
But Russia only partially controls these regions and faces a counter-offensive from Ukraine, which seeks to retake them.