An explosion occurred in Russian-occupied Melitopol, the Ukrainian and Russian sides reported the death of the Russian-appointed head of the police department, 42-year-old Alexander Mishchenko. According to the Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, before the start of the war, Mishchenko was the head of the Azov police department, but after the city was occupied, he went over to the side of Russia. The representative of the "administration" of the Zaporozhye region, Vladimir Rogov, also announced the death of Mishchenko, calling the incident a terrorist attack.
The explosion occurred at about 5:20 in the morning near a residential building on Heroiv Ukrainy Street (occupation authorities call Kirov Street), an improvised explosive device went off.
The “administration” of the city appointed by Russia reported an explosion at the entrance of a high-rise building. According to her, another security official was injured in the explosion, he was hospitalized.
The Insider notes that a previously similar report about the death of one of the pro-Russian officials turned out to be untrue, despite publications in both Russian and Ukrainian sources. On August 6, military commander Yuri Kotenok reported that Vitaly Gura, appointed by Russia as the "deputy head" of the Novokakhovka administration for housing and communal services, died while being transported to a Crimean hospital after an assassination attempt was made on him. The death was reported by both Ukrainian sources (“Strana.ua”) and the Kremlin media. However, more than a month later, on September 12, Channel One showed a story that Gura was actually alive, and his murder was called a staging by the FSB "in the name of salvation."
After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, state-run Russian media began to report attacks on pro-Russian representatives of the administrations, including Ukrainian officials who had defected to the Russian side. Some reports of assassination attempts and subsequent deaths were later confirmed. In August, Alexei Kovalev, ex-deputy of the Servant of the People party, who went over to the side of Russia, was killed in the Kherson region. According to the ICR, he was attacked in his house, he died from a gunshot wound. In July, in the Russian-occupied Kharkiv region, a car with Yevgeny Yunakov, appointed by the Russian Federation to the post of head of the village of Veliky Burluk, was blown up, he died. Also in June, the car of the “head of the Department of Family, Youth and Sports” of the occupation administration of the Kherson region, Dmitry Savluchenko, was blown up in Kherson, he also died on the spot.
