Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register LONDON, July 11 (Reuters) – The Russian-appointed administrator of a small town in the Russian-held east of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region was killed by a car bomb believed to be the work of Ukrainian saboteurs, regional occupation authorities said, according to a Russian news agency. TASS. The military-civilian administration said Yevgeny Yunakov, head of the Velikyi Burluk command, was killed by a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance team, according to TASS. While Russia has made clear it wants to wrest the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk from Kiev’s control, it has shown no sign of wanting to relinquish other territory it has seized since the February 24 invasion of Ukraine. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Along with parts of the Kharkiv region in the east, Russian forces have also seized parts of southern Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhia provinces. Also on Monday, occupation authorities in Zaporizhia reported that Andrei Shiguta, the Russian governor of Melitopol, one of the first cities to fall to Russian forces, escaped an attempt on his life by a saboteur who fired into his home . Vladimir Rogov, a senior official in the Russian-appointed civil-military command of Zaporizhia province, said on his Telegram channel that the would-be assassin was killed in a shootout. On June 24, a senior official of the Kherson regional administration stationed in Russia was killed by a bomb, according to the deputy head of the administration. read more The next day, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service declined to comment on partisan resistance efforts in the occupied territories, but told Reuters that “those people who betrayed Ukraine and all those wretches who came here to destroy our country will be destroyed ». read more Russia calls the invasion a “special military operation” and says it had to act to protect Russian-speakers in Ukraine from persecution and defuse a Western-backed threat to Russia’s security. Kyiv and the West say these are unfounded pretexts for a war of imperial conquest. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Written by Kevin Liffey. Edited by Bernadette Baum Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
