By Tom Balmforth
KYIV (Reuters) – A bomb planted under a car blew up and killed a Russian serviceman in occupied Crimea’s city of Sevastopol on Wednesday, in what a Kyiv security source said was a Ukrainian hit on a senior naval official accused of war crimes.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles probes into serious crimes, said in a statement that it was treating the crime as terrorism and that an improvised explosive device had detonated, killing a serviceman whom it did not identify.
A source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) told Reuters that the explosion had killed Valery Trankovsky, a Russian naval captain in charge of the headquarters of the 41st brigade of Russia’s Black Sea missile ships.
The operation was carried out by the SBU, the source said, describing the hit as legitimate and in line with the customs of war. The source accused Trankovsky of war crimes for ordering missile strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine.
Russia has used warships from its Black Sea Fleet, as well as strategic bombers, to conduct missile strikes on targets across Ukraine, leading to hundreds of civilian casualties.
Russia says it does not target civilians or civilian infrastructure.
Baza, a Telegram channel close to Russia’s security services, identified the serviceman as “Valery T.”, describing him as a “captain first rank” for the Black Sea Fleet. It said he was the former chief of staff of the missile ship brigade.
Both Baza and the Kyiv source said the bomb had detonated on Taras Shevchenko street, which is named after Ukraine’s most famous poet.
Baza published images of the wreckage of a car.
‘LIQUIDATED’
Several pro-war Russian figures have been assassinated since the start of the war in operations blamed by Moscow on Ukraine, including journalist Darya Dugina, war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky and former submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky.
All of those people, as well as Trankovsky, were listed in Myrotvorets (Peacemaker), a huge unofficial Ukrainian database of people considered to be enemies of the country. On Wednesday Trankovsky’s photo on the site was overwritten with the word “Liquidated” in red letters.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said last December that it had cracked a network of Ukrainian agents in Crimea who were involved in attempts to assassinate pro-Russian figures.
It said the targets included the Moscow-installed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, and a former pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament, Oleg Tsaryov.
Tsaryov survived despite being shot twice in an attack in October in Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. A source in Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency told Reuters at the time that the shooting was an SBU operation.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; editing by Gareth Jones)
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