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In March 2022, Kyva was expelled from the Ukrainian parliament, which he had entered in 2019 representing a Russia-leaning political party. He called for Ukraine to surrender and said that the Russian army was on “a sacred mission” to “liberate a brotherly nation,” referring to Ukraine.
In contrast, speaking on Ukrainian television in 2017, Kyva said that “all lovers of the Russian world” would be “removed from the face of Ukraine”.
In November, a court in Kyiv sentenced him in absentia to 14 years in prison for charges including treason and the attempted violent overthrow of government.
The targeting of prominent Russian and pro-Russian figures has long been part of the broader Ukrainian war effort and has continued apace even as fierce battles rage across a vast front line that has moved little over the past year.
In October, Oleg Tsaryov, another former Ukrainian MP who fled for Russia, survived an assassination attempt in Crimea. In May, Zakhar Prilepin, a popular Russian nationalist writer and politician, survived a car bombing in a village in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region.
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Other deaths that appeared to be assassinations have been successful.
In August 2022, a car bombing in a Moscow suburb killed Daria Dugina, daughter of a hawkish pro-invasion commentator. US intelligence agencies said they believed Ukrainian government representatives authorised the attack.
Last April, a prominent Russian military blogger, Maksim Fomin, who was widely known by his pen name Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed after a bomb exploded in a St Petersburg restaurant, where he was meeting with his supporters.
Russia claimed Ukrainian special services were behind the attack. Ukraine has denied involvement.
In July, a Russian submarine commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky, was gunned down while out on a jog in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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