Senior Russian naval officer dies in Crimea car bombing

A senior Russian naval officer has been killed in a car bombing in occupied Crimea the latest in a series of targeted attacks on Russian military personnel.

- ANDY GREGORY

Russian investigators said an unnamed serviceman was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated yesterday in the port city of Sevastopol – the primary headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet – and that the killing was being treated as terrorism.

In what will be a blow to the morale of Russian military leaders, a source in Ukraine’s SBU security service said shortly after the blast that the explosion had killed naval captain Valery Trankovsky – in a hit orchestrated by the SBU. Describing the hit as legitimate and in line with the customs of war, the source called Trankovsky “a war criminal” for ordering missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets, including repeated attacks on Odesa and a missile strike that killed 29 people and injured more than 200 others in the city of Vinnytsia in July 2022.

Despite having been significantly depleted and scattered to more remote locations by Ukrainian drone attacks, Russia has repeatedly used Vladimir Putin’s prized Black Sea Fleet to conduct missile strikes against Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in 2022.