Russia arrests two suspects in Crimean car bomb assassination

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia has arrested two suspects believed to be behind the assassination of a senior naval officer who was killed by a car bomb in Crimea last week, investigators said on Tuesday.

Valery Trankovsky, a naval captain and the chief of staff of the 41st brigade of Russia’s missile ships in the Black Sea, died in a black saloon car that was blown up in the city of Sevastopol.

A source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) told Reuters at the time that it was responsible for the operation, describing Trankovsky as one of the most senior Russian officials that Kyiv has targeted in this way.

Russia’s state Investigative Committee said the two suspects were a 47-year-old man, accused of making and detonating the bomb, and a 38-year-old woman who it said had carried out surveillance on the target.

In a video published by Russian military news outlet Zvezda, the pair were shown confessing to the crime. The man said he had been recruited by the SBU in the summer of 2023 and given the task of “liquidating” a high-ranking military officer.

Their faces were blurred out in the video and it was not clear if they were speaking freely or under duress.

Crimea, which Russia seized and unilaterally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, provides the base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Several Russian pro-war figures have been assassinated since the start of the war, in operations blamed by Moscow on Ukraine.

They include journalist Darya Dugina and war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, both killed by bombs, and former submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky, who was gunned down during a morning run.