Ukraine says organised killing of ‘traitor’ ex-lawmaker who defected to Russia

Russian investigators said Kyva had been shot.

His body was discovered in a park in the Moscow suburbs on Wednesday.

“An unknown person fired shots at the victim from an unidentified weapon. The man died on the spot from his injuries,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement.

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It said it had opened a case into his death.

The Russian news agency TASS cited a police officer as saying the investigation was being treated as a “Ukrainian plot” and that search operations for the killer were under way.

Speaking on national TV, Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesperson Andriy Yusov said: “We can confirm that Kyva is done. Such a fate will befall other traitors of Ukraine, as well as the henchmen of the Putin regime”.

Yusov called Kyva “one of the biggest scumbags, traitors and collaborators” and said his death was “justice”.

The day before Russia’s invasion, Kyva said the country had been “soaked by Nazism” and needed “liberating” by Russia – echoing talking points regularly advanced by Russian officials and on state TV.

He had written to Russian President Vladimir Putin requesting Russian citizenship, and a court in Ukraine had sentenced him in absentia to 14 years for high treason.

Kyva said in a Wednesday morning post on his Telegram channel that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would “be better off killing himself”.

Kyiv used to rarely comment on whether it was behind several killings of pro-Russian figures, both inside Russia and in parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces.

But lately, it has started to claim responsibility for a number of attacks and openly threatened to hunt down other “collaborators” and “traitors”.

Moscow has previously said Ukraine was behind other audacious assassinations deep inside Russia’s borders.

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Ukraine has not publicly claimed responsibility for those attacks, though US intelligence and media reports have linked Kyiv to them.

Several lower-ranking Ukrainian officials and politicians who have welcomed Russia’s invasion and worked for Russian-backed authorities in occupied parts of Ukraine have also been killed.

In a separate incident, a proxy lawmaker in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region was killed in a car bombing attack also on Wednesday, Russian investigators said.

Oleg Popov, who served as a deputy in the pro-Moscow Luhansk regional parliament, was killed after the “detonation of an unidentified device in a car”, Russia’s Investigative Committee said, without providing details.