Mr Fifty Percent Kherson's ex-mayor takes on new role for Russia

The Russians were Volodymyr Saldo's salvation. The wealthy Ukrainian in his 50s had done a stint in the national parliament T and won three terms as the mayor of the southern city of Kherson, but at the start of 2022 police had opened a case against him for ordering a contract killing.

- Tom Burgis Kherson

"I wanted to jail him," says Oleksandr Prokudin, Kherson's police chief at the time and now the city's governor, sitting in the basement he has used for meetings since the Russians blew the roof off his office.

Detectives had found the intermediary they suspected of sending gangland assassins to shoot one of Saldo's enemies. And the intermediary had told them it was Saldo who had paid, Prokudin says. "Then the war happened." Today, Saldo is beyond the reach of Ukrainian law. He is once again a powerful politician - Vladimir Putin's chosen ruler of the occupied territory across the river from Kherson. From there, shells, bombs and mortars rain down ceaselessly on the city he used to run.

A Guardian investigation into Saldo's regime reveals how, under the banner of Russian nationalism, the invaders and their collaborators appear to be using terror tactics to construct on Ukrainian soil an extension of the gangster state Putin has built at home, where cronies grow rich and dissent is punished.

With the frontline in the war looking deadlocked - and with influential westerners calling on Ukraine to surrender occupied lands to Putin as the price of peace - it is a regime under which millions of Ukrainians may be condemned to live for years.