According to the regional occupation authorities, a car bomb believed to have been planted by Ukrainian people killed the Russian-appointed administrator of a small town in the Russian-occupied east of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.
The military-civilian government claimed that Yevgeny Yunakov, the top administrator of a settlement called Velykyi Burluk, had been allegedly assassinated by a Ukrainian reconnaissance group, TASS reported.
The district head of Melitopol, one of the first towns to be taken over by Russian forces, Andrei Siguta, was claimed to have narrowly survived a shooting at his residence by occupation officials in Zaporizhzhia.
According to a senior member of the Russian-appointed civil-military government of the province of Zaporizhzhia, Vladimir Rogov, the alleged would-be assassin was shot and killed.
A bomb murdered a senior official last month, according to the deputy administrator of the Russian-installed Kherson regional administration.
The chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, said the following day that he would not comment on partisan opposition attempts in occupied territory but added, “Those people who betrayed Ukraine and all those wretches who came here to destroy our country will be destroyed.”
Although Russia has made it clear that it wants to free the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk from Kyiv’s rule, the Kremlin has not indicated that it wants to give up any other lands it has annexed since invading Ukraine on February 24.
Russian forces have also taken large portions of the southern Ukrainian provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, in addition to the eastern Kharkiv region.
Russia describes the invasion as a “special military operation.” The Kremlin claims it has to take action to defend Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine from retaliation and neutralize a Western-backed security threat. Kyiv and the West have said these are weak justifications for a war of imperial conquest.