A car explosion killed a deputy and former military commander in Ukraine’s Luhansk (east) region occupied by Russia, local media reported on Wednesday.
Mikhail Filiponenko was not only a member of the People’s Council of the Luhansk People’s Republic (RPL), but also a founding member of the Luhansk separatist army in 2014, at the beginning of the war between Kiev and pro-Russian forces backed by Moscow.
“An hour ago, in Luhansk, our colleague, deputy of the People’s Council of the RPL, former head of the Department of the People’s Militia of the LPR, the man who spearheaded the creation of the People’s Militia of the Republic Colonel Mikhail Yuryevich Filiponenko died tragically,” wrote local deputy Yuri Yurov.
The victim’s son, Ivan Filiponenko, told the Lug-Info news portal that his father had suffered “fatal injuries.”
Yurov stated on the social network Telegram that Mikhail Filiponenko had already been the target of a bomb attack on his vehicle in Lugansk on February 21, 2022.
According to this source, quoted by the French agency AFP, Filiponenko miraculously escaped the explosion with his life in 2022 and only the driver was injured.
Luhansk and Donetsk, which together form Donbass, were the two regions that launched a separatist war against Ukraine in 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
After invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Moscow declared that the Ukrainian regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, as well as Kherson and Zaporijia, were added to the territory of the Russian Federation.
Ukraine and the majority of the international community do not recognize Russia’s annexation of the five regions.
Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporijia are regularly hit by attacks, sometimes fatal, against officials of the Russian occupation government.
Since the February 2022 offensive, Russian authorities have held Ukraine responsible for several killings or attempted killings.
Before that date, areas under pro-Russian control in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions had also been hit by fatal settlements between separatists, AFP said.
Last week, Russian security services (FSB) accused Kiev of being behind the attempted assassination in Crimea in late October of a former Ukrainian deputy who defected to Russia, Oleg Tsarov.
Source: DN
