A Russian military officer labelled as a Ukrainian defector was killed in a bomb attack on Thursday in Russian-annexed Crimea. Robert Shageyev was described on Russian Telegram channels as a former Ukrainian naval officer who switched allegiance to Russia during Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 when he was commanding Ukraine’s only submarine, the Zaporizhzhia. Myrotvorets – a Ukrainian website keeping a database of people described as war criminals or traitors – said Shageyev had been “liquidated”.
The attack took place in Sevastopol, the biggest city in Russian-annexed Crimea. The regional governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said a woman was arrested on suspicion of assassinating Shageyev on behalf of Ukrainian special services. State news agency TASS quoted the FSB security service as saying the arrested woman was a Russian national. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Separately, Razvozhayev said four Russian explosives experts and a security guard were killed in Sevastopol while trying to dispose of an explosive device.
A Russian drone attack on a passenger train killed two people, Ukrainian officials said. “Today in the Odesa region, the Russians once again destroyed an ordinary passenger train locomotive with a jet-powered drone. There were 340 people on the train,” said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Thursday. “Whoever was operating that drone certainly could not have been unaware that the target was entirely civilian,” he added. The dead were the train’s engineer and assistant engineer, officials said.
