Ukraine says it blew up a Russian military commander in a car bomb in Crimea

Kyiv, Ukraine – Ukraine planned an attack on Russia’s Crimean peninsula that killed a senior Russian military officer, Ukrainian security sources told AFP and Reuters on Wednesday. The killing, confirmed by Moscow, is the latest in a series of attacks on Russian military officials and pro-Kremlin public figures. on the territory of Ukraine and within Russia.

A source in Ukraine’s security service told AFP that they planned a bomb attack in the city of Sevastopol that killed naval officer Valery Trankovsky, who was the first captain of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

“As a result of this explosion, the Russian captain’s legs were blown off and he died from blood loss,” the source said in writing. It described Trankovsky as a “war criminal” responsible for launching cruise missiles from the Black Sea at civilian targets in Ukraine.

A car exploded and caught fire in the eastern district of Gagarin city around 02:00 Eastern, said the governor of Sevastopol stationed in Russia, Mikhail Razvozhayev.

“As a result of an explosive device placed under the vehicle, a Russian soldier was killed,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement after the incident, without identifying Trankovsky.

They said they have opened an investigation into “the reality of the terrorist attack.”

A witness who spoke to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said the driver was thrown by the impact of the passenger seat and “everyone immediately realized that he had been blown up.”

“The explosives were placed next to the driver’s seat,” said the unnamed woman, adding that the car was moving when the explosion occurred.

Explosives from the explosion hit several other vehicles but no one was injured, the witness said.

In October, Ukraine claimed responsibility for killing an official at Russia’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. In April, a car bomb in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Lugansk killed a government official appointed by Moscow.

Wednesday’s explosion in Crimea came as Russia targeted the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, with a barrage of missiles and drones, most of which the Ukrainian military said were downed. It also came as the US and South Korea said North Korean soldiers had joined the war and Russian troops trying to repel a months-long Ukrainian offensive on the Kursk region in western Russia.

A US State Department spokesman said on Tuesday that “most” of the estimated 10,000 North Korean troops sent to Russia had been sent to Kursk and had “started fighting Russian forces.”