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By Brendan Cole and Michael D. Carroll
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A Russian Black Sea fleet commander has been killed in a car bomb explosion in Crimea, it has been reported.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of the occupied peninsula, said that a military officer was in a car that exploded in the street in the city of Sevastopol on Wednesday morning.
The victim was identified as Valery Trankovsky, a captain of the 1st rank in the fleet, according to the Telegram channel Baza, which is said to have links to Russia's intelligence services.
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The killing was carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), an unnamed source in the agency told the Kyiv Independent. Trankovsky was described by the source as a "war criminal who has ordered cruise missile launches from the Black Sea against civilian sites in Ukraine."
Newsweek has contacted the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministries for comment.
Russian emergency personnel arrived on the scene at around 10 a.m. local time, six minutes after the explosion, but the victim succumbed to his injuries shortly after.
Russian media outlet Mash said that Trankovsky had been under surveillance for around a week and that an improvised explosive device had been placed under the driver's car and was detonated remotely.
Images posted on social media showed what appeared to be the aftermath of the explosion, with bystanders gathering around a wrecked vehicle.
Razvozhayev said a criminal case into a suspected terror act has been opened and that the circumstances of the incident "are being established."
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Trankovsky was chief of staff for a missile boat brigade involved in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty*.*
The incident on Wednesday follows the deaths of several other Russian officers in the occupied territories in Ukraine throughout the war.
In October, a senior Russian pilot complicit in a deadly attack on a Ukrainian mall was found dead with hammer wounds to the head, according to the Ukrainian military intelligence. The pilot, named as Dmitry Golenkov, was said to be involved in the missile strike on civilians at Amstor mall in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, on June 27, 2022.
Russian military bloggers and independent outlets reported that Major General Pavel Klimenko, who commanded the Fifth Separate Motor Rifle Brigade in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, had been killed last week.
There were initial reports that he had been killed in a drone strike while he was riding a motorcycle near Krasnohorivka in the Donetsk region.
However, the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, which claims to have links to Russian intelligence, said this was a cover-up and that he was in a state of "severe alcoholic intoxication" before his death.
Update 11/13/24, 6:30 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with further information.
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