"The Russian captain's legs were blown off and he died of blood loss," a Ukrainian security official told the AFP news agency about the assassination.

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.

In October, Ukraine claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack that killed an official at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. In April, a car bomb in Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine’s eastern Lugansk region killed a Moscow-appointed government official.

The Telegram channel Baza identified the serviceman as 47-year-old Valery Trankovsky, a captain of the 1st rank in the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

A top Russian navy commander accused of war crimes was assassinated in a Ukraine-planted car bomb explosion in Crimea on Wednesday, sources said. Valery Trankovsky, who headed the 41st brigade of Russia’s Black Sea missile ships,

In Sevastopol, during a special operation by the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), the head of the 41st Brigade of Missile Ships and Boats of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Valery Trankovsky, was eliminated.

A source within Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) later confirmed to the Kyiv Post that the explosion was the result of