Getty Images
- Ukraine said it killed a Russian-backed lawmaker in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday.
- Mikhail Filiponenko, a deputy in Luhansk, died in a car bomb explosion, per Ukrainian intelligence.
- "Yeah, it was our operation," a Ukrainian official told Politico Europe.
A pro-Russian lawmaker was killed in a coordinated attack carried out by resistance fighters in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine's military intelligence agency said in a statement.
Mikhail Filiponenko, a member of the Russian-backed parliament in occupied Luhansk, and a former leader of its armed forces, died in a car bomb explosion on Wednesday, per the statement.
Andriy Cherniak, a representative of Ukrainian intelligence, confirmed to Politico Europe that Ukraine was behind the bombing.
"Yeah, it was our operation," he told the outlet.
Luhansk Information Center, a news agency run by Moscow-installed officials in the region, quoted Filiponenko's son as saying his father died of his wounds.
The Ukrainian intelligence statement said that it knew the home and work addresses of all Russian-backed lawmakers who defected in the Russian-occupied territories, suggesting more officials could be targeted.
Filiponenko joined Russian-backed mercenaries in 2014, and helped Moscow take control of the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, according to Reuters.
His death is the latest in a series of assassinations that Ukraine has carried out in the occupied territories since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Last month, the Washington Post reported that Valery Gerasimov, Russia's Chief of the General Staff, had also come close to death in a Ukrainian strike on the front lines, citing Ukrainian intelligence.
The report did not specify when or where the attack took place.
Prior to that, Darya Dugina, a prominent war supporter and daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, commonly known as "Putin's brain," was assassinated by a car bomb outside Moscow in August 2022, Insider previously reported.
Major-General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence service, told The Times of London in May that his agents had killed Kremlin-backed propagandists who support the war.