Guerilla warfare and targeted assassinations: Inside Ukraine’s partisan resistance

Dmytro Savluchenko was one of Moscow’s useful idiots: a Ukrainian advocate of Russkiy Mir (or ‘Russian world’), Putin’s idea of a kind of reich of Russian-speaking peoples. Back in 2014, when the Russian army stormed the Donbas region, Savluchenko
campaigned for Kherson (an area bordering Crimea) to join Russia. More recently, Savluchenko has served as a senior official in the Russian-installed administration of Ukraine’s occupied Kherson region. His career ended this morning, when he was killed by a car bomb.

His killing marks the start of a new phase in the war: guerilla warfare and targeted assassination. ‘Our partisans have another victory…a Russian activist and traitor was blown up in a car in one of Kherson’s yards in the morning. This will be the case with every traitor’, said Serhiy Khlan, an adviser to the Kherson Military Administration (part of the Ukrainian government).

So was this a special forces hit job? Or gangsterism? Denis Kazansky, a Ukrainian journalist, published photos after the explosion, saying that there has been plenty of looting and that ‘the possibility of criminal showdowns cannot be ruled out… the ‘parade of explosions’ that is now taking place from Melitopol to Kherson is not always the work of the Security Service of Ukraine.