The car Svetlana had been in exploded, leaving her with fatal injuries (Picture: East2West News)
A mayor in a Russian-occupied region of Ukraine has been killed in a car bombing ahead of this week’s presidential election.
Svetlana Samoilenko, 46, was the Kremlin-appointed deputy mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city of Berdyansk, in the annexed Zaporizhzhia region.
A Russian security official said: ‘When the owner of the car, who was a voting member of the election commission, got into her ZAZ Tavria car, the improvised explosive device went off. The victim died from her injuries in a medical facility.’
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency had identified Samoilenko as ‘collaborator’ before announcing she had been ‘eliminated’.
They added: ‘During the preparations for the pseudo-elections, Putin’s Svitlana Samoilenko sought to curry favor with Muscovites: she intimidated and terrorized Berdyansk residents, forcing them to participate in illegal fake voting.’
She had been appointed by Russia as deputy mayor of the port city, and was a key organiser of this week’s Russian elections in the occupied territories.
Svetlana was appointed by the Kremlin (Picture :East2West News)
Former SBU agent Igor Tsiferov’s condition from the car explosion is unknown (Picture: East2West News)
Her car was blown up along with the car of a Ukrainian SBU secret service agent who ‘switched sides to join Russia’ after the invasion.
Former SBU agent Igor Tsiferov, 52, was inside of his car that exploded but his condition is currently unknown.
Military journalist Andrei Tsaplienko said: ‘He went over to the enemy’s side and worked in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic’s Ministry of State Security.
’There is no information yet about Tsiferov’s condition. Tsiferov is a former SBU officer.’
Ukraine is known to operate sabotage teams inside Russia-occupied areas of its country, which may have been behind the double assassination attempt ahead of this week’s elections in Russia.
Last month, Putin’s challenger in the elections, Boris Nadezhdin, was barred from running in the presidential election.
The two car bombings come on the week of the Russian presidential elections (Picture: Reuters)
Voting has already begun in annexed territories in Ukraine (Picture: Reuters)
Election authorities claimed that more than 15 per cent of the signatures he gathered are flawed.
It is a strong signal from the Kremlin that it won’t tolerate any public opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.
Nadezhdin, whose surname is derived from the Russian word for ‘hope’, was the only candidate calling for peace in Ukraine, calling the war ‘a fatal mistake’, not a ‘special military operation’ like the government dictates the nation to do.
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Thousands of people lined up across Russia last month to support his candidacy, an unusual show of opposition sympathies.
Nobody expected Nadezhdin to actually win the election, but his ousting shows a nervousness in the Kremlin.
The 60-year-old gave a sense of optimism to those opposing the war, and many of them stood in bitterly cold temperatures to sign petitions.
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