A Russian air force commander blamed for a deadly bombing attack on a Ukrainian shopping centre has been found bludgeoned to death.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said ‘war criminal’ Col Dmitry Golenkov was assassinated with the ‘hammer of justice’ after his battered body was found in Russia’s Bryansk region.
Golenkov was said to have ordered the bombing of the Amstor shopping centre in Kremenchuk in June 2022. It remains one of the most devastating attacks on civilian targets in the entire two-and-a-half-year war – killing 22 people and wounding 59.
There were 1,000 people crammed inside at the time.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky described it as one of the ‘most brazen terrorist acts in European history’.
He said the shopping centre had no strategic value to Russia and posed no danger to its forces – ‘only the attempt of people to live a normal life, which so angers the occupiers’.
Golenkov was also held responsible for a missile strike on a residential building in Dnipro in January 2023, when 46 Ukrainian civilians were killed, including 6 children.
Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency said: ‘A Russian Tu-22M3 pilot has been liquidated on the territory of the Russian Federation. His head was smashed with a hammer.’
The Tupolev Tu-22M3 is a modernised version of a Soviet-era long-range strategic bomber which have been used for raids in Ukraine during the war.
It is unclear how Ukraine carried out the killing, but special forces and partisans have been conducting operations further inside Russia and its occupied territories throughout the war.
Video footage shows Golenkov’s body lying face down in shrubland in the village of Suponevo with his head covered in blood.
The GUR said he served as chief of staff of the aviation squadron of the 52nd heavy bomber aviation regiment based in the neighbouring region of Kaluga.
It added: ‘He was involved in missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets.’
The Russian defence ministry has not commented.
Golenkov’s assassination behind enemy lines is not the first to be claimed by Ukraine’s military intelligence.
Dozens of collaborators have been killed by Ukrainian agents in occupied territory. Last year, an agent planted a bomb inside a bust to kill a Russian military blogger inside a St Petersburg café.
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