Partisans try to assassinate ‘collaborator’ Donetsk judge
Ukrainian fighters shoot pro-Russian official who handed death sentences to British prisoners of war
UKRAINIAN partisans yesterday tried to assassinate a judge in the rebel Donetsk region who handed down death sentences to two British prisoners of war.
Pro-Russia Alexander Nikulin was shot several times on Friday evening in a town in the eastern part of Donetsk and left badly injured.
“His condition is assessed by doctors to be stable but serious,” Denis Pushilin, the Kremlin-installed head of Donetsk region, said on his Telegram channel.
Ukraine’s military has not claimed responsibility but it is the latest example of partisan attacks on collaborator officials in regions that Russia annexed after sham referendums in September.
Most of the assassinations have targeted officials in the southern Kherson region – rarely have they happened in the Donbas.
Mr Nikulin was reviled by the Ukrainian fighters military and its International Legion for handing down death sentences to prisoners of war.
In June, he sentenced Britons Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner to death after a sham trial in Donetsk. They had been captured a few months earlier after the surrender of Ukrainian forces in Mariupol. They were pictured standing in a cage with their heads shaved, showing signs of malnutrition and beatings as Mr Nikulin handed them their death sentences.
They were released in September as part of a deal brokered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Analysts have said that partisans have intensified their attacks against collaborator officials over the past couple of months as the Ukrainian army has pushed back Russian forces around Kharkiv in the north east and Kherson in the south.
The Kremlin has responded to its battlefield losses by firing cruise missiles and launching drone attacks on Ukraine’s cities. Western intelligence said that the drones have been bought from Iran and then repainted and rebranded as Russian.
Yesterday, the Iranian government admitted for the first time that it had sold drones to the Kremlin although it said that the deal was made before Russia’s full-scale invasion and not in July when Vladimir Putin visited Tehran.
“We gave a limited number of drones to Russia months before the Ukraine war,” Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told reporters.
The Kremlin has said that the drone swarms have targeted essential military-civilian infrastructure, but they have also killed several people and the Ukrainian government has warned Iran that it will retaliate.
Ukrainian officials have previously said that the Kremlin is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to try to crush morale before winter.
They have said that Russian attacks have destroyed around 40 per cent of its power-generating capacity.
Now Ukrenergo, the national energy company, has said that it needs to introduce “emergency power outages” instead of hourly blackouts to ration energy more severely. In a message it said: “Dear Ukrainians, please do not abandon the habit of consciously treating electricity consumption.”
Separately, in Russia, security services arrested a soldier about to be redeployed to Ukraine after he allegedly killed at least 13 people by setting fire to a nightclub in Kostroma, a town in central Russia.
Stanislav Ionkin, 23, had been injured in August by shelling and was recuperating in a hospital in Russia. He was reportedly due to return to his unit and possibly be sent back to the front line in Ukraine later this month.
Video uploaded on to the Telegram app showed Russian security services wearing balaclavas and armed with pistols marching a handcuffed Mr Ionkin into a police station. It is unclear if he deliberately fired the fireworks into the Polygon nightclub.
In October two Tajik men mobilised into the Russian army were blamed for killing at least 11 other conscripts at a rifle range in southern Russia.