A Russian administrator in a small town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region has been killed by a car bomb presumed to be the work of Ukrainian saboteurs. The military-civilian administration said Yevgeny Yunakov, the chief administrator of Velikyi Burluk, was killed by Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups.

Russian forces have recently captured chunks of the southern Ukrainian provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as well as many parts of the Kharkiv region in the east. Occupation authorities in Zaporizhzhia also reported Andrei Siguta, the Russian district head of Melitopol had escaped an attempted murder.

Vladimir Rogov, a senior member of the Russian civil-military in the Zaporizhzhia province said that the would-be assassin had been killed later in a shootout. Senior officials in the Kherson regional administration were also killed by bombs, according to the deputy head of the administration.

"Those people who betrayed Ukraine and all those wretches who came here to destroy our country will be destroyed".

The head of Ukrainian military intelligence said.