A former Ukrainian lawmaker who was wanted on treason charges after he defected and moved to Russia has reportedly been found dead near Moscow.
Ilya Kiva, a one-time adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry and the former counter-narcotics chief, was found in Odintsovo, according to News 112. His “bloodied body” was found lying in the snow at a park near a hotel, Mash reported.
The well-connected VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reported that a hotel worker found Kiva’s body, with “a hole in his head, possibly from the use of a firearm.” Several Ukrainian news outlets cited anonymous sources who said Kiva had been killed as part of a special operation by the Security Service of Ukraine against the “traitor, collaborator, and propagandist.”
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The controversial former lawmaker had previously been a member of the pro-Russian Opposition Platform-For Life party, but he was expelled in late 2021 and then left Ukraine a few months later. He then resurfaced in Russia, where he began enthusiastically spewing Kremlin propaganda and later publicly appealed to Vladimir Putin for political asylum.
Just a few hours before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kiva declared that “the Ukrainian people need liberation” and claimed Russians and Ukrainians are “one.”
News of his death came just hours after another Kremlin collaborator was killed by a car bomb in the center of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Oleg Popov, a deputy of the so-called “People’s Council” of the unrecognized Luhansk People’s Republic, was initially said to have been injured in the blast, but his colleagues soon confirmed he did not survive.
“As a result of a car bombing near the Avangard stadium in Luhansk, our colleague, deputy of the People’s Council of the LPR … member of the Donbas People’s Militia, who rose to the defense of the Republic from the very first days, Oleg Nikolaevich Popov, has died,” Popov’s colleague Yury Yurov wrote on Telegram.
Vladimir Rogov, a Russia-installed official in Zaporizhzhya, lamented that “the terrorists blew up a vehicle” with Popov inside it.
Popov was already targeted once in an assassination bid in late 2022, though he survived.
