KYIV, Ukraine — A bomb planted under a car blew up and killed a Russian serviceman in the occupied Crimean city of Sevastopol on Wednesday in what a Kyiv security source told NBC News was a Ukrainian hit on a senior naval official accused of war crimes.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles probes into serious crimes, said in a statement that an improvised explosive device had detonated, killing a serviceman whom it did not identify. It said it was treating the crime as terrorism.
A source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said the explosion killed Valery Trankovsky, a Russian naval captain in charge of the headquarters of the 41st Brigade of Russia’s Black Sea missile ships.
The car bombing was “a successful special operation of the SBU. As a result of the explosion, the legs of the Russian captain were torn off. He died from blood loss,” the source said.
The source described the hit as legitimate and in line with the customs of war, accusing Trankovsky of war crimes for ordering missile strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine.
The source said it was symbolic that the bomb had detonated on Taras Shevchenko Street, which is named after Ukraine’s most famous poet.
Russia has used warships from its Black Sea Fleet, as well as strategic bombers, to conduct missile strikes on targets across Ukraine, leading to hundreds of civilian casualties.
Russia says it does not target civilians or civilian infrastructure.
Several pro-war Russian figures have been assassinated since the start of the war in operations Moscow blamed on Ukraine, including journalist Darya Dugina, war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky and former submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said in December that it had cracked a network of Ukrainian agents in Crimea who were involved in attempts to assassinate pro-Russian figures.
It said the targets included the Moscow-installed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, and a former pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament, Oleg Tsaryov.
