The pace of executions is accelerating for Ukrainians who have chosen to collaborate with the Russian occupation authorities. On Friday, September 16, at least five of them were killed in three separate incidents in Russian-occupied southern and eastern Ukraine. Operations carried out in parallel with the two counter-offensives led by the Ukrainian army in the regions of Donetsk and Kherson.
Around noon local time, an explosion killed the prosecutor general of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and his deputy, official Russian sources said. “Sergei Gorenko died in the explosion of an improvised device in the building of the General Prosecutor’s Office in Luhansk”, said Vitali Kiselev, deputy to the “Minister of the Interior”. LPR leader Leonid Passetchnik called the assassination a“terrorist act” on his Telegram channel.
At least twenty assassination attempts
Earlier in the day, the Russian agency Interfax, quoting a local official source, announced that the deputy head of the Russian administration in Berdyansk, Oleg Boyko, and his wife had been killed. “near Boïko’s garage”. No further details of the double murder have been released. The wife, Lioudmila, headed the local territorial electoral commission responsible for organizing a referendum on joining the Russian Federation. The election date was postponed indefinitely by Moscow due to military instability. Oleg Boyko, meanwhile, was responsible for housing and communal services within the military-civilian administration of Berdyansk. Local authorities accuse “the kyiv regime” of these murders.
Also on Friday, early in the morning, an as yet unidentified projectile partially destroyed an administrative building in the heart of the city of Kherson. The attack injured the head of the region’s labor and social policy department, Alla Barkhatnova, and killed her driver, whose identity has not been disclosed, according to the Russian agency RIA Novosti. The local administration, quoted by TASS, immediately attributed the explosions to “five missiles [de fabrication américaine] Himars ». Pinpointing precisely the projectiles responsible for a bombardment usually requires a process of investigation.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for any of these attacks. On the contrary, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak tweeted that the attack “should be viewed as a confrontation of local organized crime groups squabbling over property looted prior to their escape. Or as a Russian purge of witnesses to war crimes”.
At least 20 assassination attempts have taken place in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine since the war began on February 24, according to a tally by the Russian opposition website Medusa.
