Oleg Shutov was identified by the Security Service of Ukraine as being behind the killing of a senior military intelligence officer nine years ago. A Russian-backed militant held responsible for the June 2017 killing of a senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer has been “eliminated” in a car bomb attack, Ukrainian media have reported. Oleg Shutov was killed in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk on the evening of July 27 by explosives planted in his Subaru car, the LB.ua news service reported on Monday, citing sources in Ukraine’s security services. He had been identified by Ukrainian authorities as the perpetrator of a car bombing in Kyiv that killed Defense Intelligence of Ukraine officer Maksym Shapoval. Shutov’s death and details of the operation surrounding it have only now come to light, after the special operations team responsible returned to Ukrainian-controlled territory, LB.ua said. The news site published pictures of the surveillance of Shutov and of the aftermath of the attack, which it said had been provided by its sources in the security services, without specifying which services were involved. Separatist ‘terrorist’ Shutov was an officer of the so-called Special Operations Center of the Ministry of State Security of the Donetsk People's Republic, described by the Ukrainska Pravda news site as a “self-proclaimed Russia-backed quasi-state formation in Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.” The Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics were proclaimed in April 2014 by Russia-backed separatist groups seeking to break away from Ukraine following the 2013-14 ‘Maidan’ uprising against then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Shutov was publicly named in April 2019 by Vasyl Hrytsak, then head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), as an operative of the DPR “state security ministry's” special operations center, a body the SBU says answered to officers of Russia's FSB security service. The SBU accused Shutov of planting explosives in the car of Major General Maksym Shapoval, as well as being complicit in an earlier deadly attack on Ukrainian counterintelligence officer Oleksandr Kharaberiush. Kharaberiush, deputy head of the main counterintelligence department of the SBU's Donetsk Oblast Directorate, was killed on March 31, 2017, in a car bombing in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. According to Ukrainian law enforcement officials, Russian intelligence was behind both assassinations, which were classified by Kyiv as terrorist attacks.
