Three high-ranking Russian military officers killed in the occupied territories, several others arrested or suspended

On 13 November, the commander of the 41st Brigade of missile launching vessels and boats of the Black Sea Fleet, Valery Trankovsky, was killed in occupied Sevastopol in Crimea. Trankovsky’s car exploded while he was driving through the city, allegedly with an explosive device that was set off remotely. Eyewitnesses reported a powerful explosion.

Several Ukrainian media outlets, citing SBU sources, reported that the assassination of Trankovsky was a Ukrainian special operation.

“Trankovsky is a war criminal who ordered the launch of cruise missiles from the Black Sea at civilian targets in Ukraine. In particular, he shelled Vinnytsia with ‘Kalibr’ in July 2022. Then 29 civilians were killed. The bastard has also repeatedly shelled Odesa and other peaceful cities, killing many civilians,” Radio Liberty quoted a source in the security agency.

In the nearly three years of full-scale war in Ukraine, this is not the first time a high-ranking Russian military officer or collaborator has been killed by an explosive device.

In the past month and a half alone, in addition to Trankovsky, the cars of Andriy Korotkyi, an employee of the Zaporizhzhia Nuklear Power Plant security department, and Vitaliy Lomeiko, a collaborator judge, were blown up in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region.

Korotkyi was killed, but it later became known that no one was in Lomeiko’s car at the time of the explosion. The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine was behind both assassination attempts, the agency made clear.

Trankovsky is also the third high-ranking Russian military officer to be killed in a week. On 10 November, Yevgeniy Ladnov, commander of a tank regiment of the 67th Division, was killed by an alleged artillery shelling near occupied Kreminna in the Luhansk region.

Russian media, citing Russian servicemen, claimed that Ladnov and his subordinates, on his orders, shot at soldiers who refused to go on “meat assaults.”

On 6 November, the commander of the 5th Donetsk Motorised Rifle Brigade, Pavel Klymenko, was killed in the occupied Krasnohorivka near Donetsk as a result of an alleged drone attack.

Officers of the 5th Brigade have been accused of murdering, torturing and intimidating Russian servicemen, as well as killing a pro-Russian blogger from the United States, Russell Bentley, who had been living in occupied Donetsk since 2014.

According to the victims and their relatives, the officers forced the soldiers to hand over their bank cards, which were credited with salaries, bonuses and compensation for injuries, sometimes deliberately caused by the officers themselves, Russian media claimed.
The command of the 5th Brigade has been also accused of mass disappearances of soldiers.

In mid-September, the commander of the 110th Guards Brigade, Vladimir Novikov, and his deputy, Alexander Gvozdev, were arrested in Donetsk. According to a Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, which is affiliated with the Russian law enforcement agencies, the reason was an inspection of their military unit by the local military prosecutor’s office.

For a long time, Russian media have been disseminating information about places of forced detention and torture of Russian servicemen by their own officers in the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

According to the VChK-OGPU, the prosecutor’s inspection of Novikov’s unit followed a fight between him and his men with military prosecutors in a bar in Donetsk. On the territory of the unit, prosecutors found 17 soldiers who were being held in dog cages and tortured.

The Russian media outlet Mediazona was able to confirm identities of the victims, whose names were provided by the VChK-OGPU: all of them were former prisoners who had signed a contract with the Russian armed forces in exchange for early release.

Mediazona also managed to speak to mothers of three of them. Two women confirmed that the commanders tortured and intimidated their sons into giving them their bank cards.

On 12 November, the Russian media outlet ASTRA also reported that the brigade commander of the military unit 40463 in occupied Luhansk had been suspended. ASTRA linked the dismissal to the failed assault on Ukrainian positions near Bilohorivka on 2 November, which resulted in heavy casualties and approximately two hundred persons missing.

The day before, ASTRA published an audio recording of torture from the phone of one of the missing soldiers of the military unit 40463. The phone was allegedly among the personal belongings of the missing man that were handed over to his relatives.

Earlier, media and Telegram channels reported about the mass disappearance of soldiers from the military unit 40463. On social media, relatives of the missing soldiers of the unit were looking for at least the contacts of the unit and its commanders, complaining about the lack of information about the fate of their men.

According to the participants of the discussions, they lost contact with their relatives at the front and stopped receiving payments related to them, such as salaries or alimony, without any notice or explanation.