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A former Ukraine lawmaker who had been charged with treason was assassinated on Wednesday near Moscow in an operation carried out by Ukrainian security service agents, according to officials.
Ilya Kiva, 46, a proponent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and longtime opponent of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, fled to Russia last year after facing treason charges and being stripped of his mandate as a member of the Ukrainian parliament.
When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Kiva wrote on social media that “the Ukrainian people need liberation” and that “Ukrainians, Belarusians [and] Russians are one people”.
Two Ukrainian officials with direct knowledge of the killing told the Financial Times that the SBU security service had carried out the operation.
“The liquidation of a top traitor, collaborator and propagandist Ilya Kiva is a special operation of the SBU,” one of the officials said. Kiva had been killed with “small arms”, the official added.
The killing is the latest in a series of assassinations against Ukrainian defectors and Russians involved in Moscow’s invasion, and come at the sane time as attacks deep inside Russia believed to have been carried out by the SBU.
While the agency’s policy is not to take credit for the strikes, it has on some occasions claimed responsibility, as it did with the October attack on Russia’s illegally built bridge connecting the country to occupied Crimea.
Kiva, a political chameleon known for his gruff voice and quarrelsome demeanour, started as a member of the Ukrainian far-right, moved on to being a police official and unsuccessfully ran for president in 2019 as a member of the Socialist Party of Ukraine.
An avid social media user noted for his violent and graphic posts, he frequently published anti-Ukrainian propaganda, calling Kyiv’s leadership “Nazis” and demanding that Zelenskyy resign.
In an interview with Russian television prior to the invasion, he alleged that his country was “enslaved and brought to its knees by the west, permeated by Nazism, and it has no future. Ukraine needs help. The Ukrainian people need liberation.”
After his electoral loss he joined the pro-Russian Opposition Platform — For Life, a group headed by Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk, who was handed over to Moscow in a prisoner swap last year.
In March 2022, Ukraine’s parliament stripped Kiva of his seat and the prosecutor-general filed treason charges against him. Kiva eventually found his way to Russia, where he applied for asylum and pleaded with Putin to grant him Russian citizenship.
In June 2022, Ukrainian journalists reported that he had resettled in the elite Agalarov Estate in the suburbs of Moscow.
Russian channel REN-TV was the first to report Kiva’s death in the Moscow region, followed by further confirmation from Russian Telegram channels and from Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state’s RT broadcaster.
Kiva’s death came hours after Oleg Popov, a member of the pro-Kremlin regional parliament in the occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, was reportedly killed by a bomb. Russian media cited another member of the regional occupation government as saying Popov had been killed in a car explosion near the Avangard sports stadium.
Ukraine’s security service has not claimed responsibility for the attack on Popov. But it did for the death of pro-Russian legislator Mikhail Filiponenko in an explosion in Luhansk in early November.
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