A Ukrainian politician once said to have been considered for leader of a Kremlin-controlled puppet government in Ukraine is in a critical condition after he was shot twice in an apparent assassination attempt at a sanatorium in Crimea.
Oleg Tsaryov, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian figure who played a prominent political role in the 2014 war against the Kyiv government, was shot twice by an unknown assailant, his associates have confirmed.
“Oleg is fighting for his life. After the attempt on his life tonight, Oleg lost a lot of blood,” wrote Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, which is under Moscow’s partial control.
Rogov, a close ally of Tsaryov’s, said he had been shot twice. He denied earlier reports that Tsaryov had been stabbed. Video taken from near the sanatorium showed an ambulance and warning tape near the alleged crime scene.
“He is now in intensive care,” Rogov said. “Doctors are doing everything possible and even more.”
Tsaryov’s account on Telegram said his relatives had confirmed the assassination attempt. When the ambulance arrived to take him away, Tsaryov was unconscious and “had lost a lot of blood”, a statement from the channel’s administrators said.
Russia’s FSB law enforcement and intelligence service opened a criminal case for Tsaryov’s attempted murder and did not name a suspect.
Tsaryov was reported to have been tipped by the Kremlin to head an occupation government for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Shortly before the invasion, a western intelligence official told the Financial Times that Moscow “might position Oleg Tsaryov, and others, in leadership roles as part of this effort.”
Tsaryov himself denied the claims, calling them “pretty funny” because he had been driven off Kremlin television and was then employed as a “sanatorium director in Yalta”.
A British Foreign Office report claimed that Moscow planned to install a puppet government, although it named other figures including the former Ukrainian MP Yevhen Murayev. “The British Foreign Office seems confused,” he told the Guardian, denying the reports.
Tsaryov served as a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada parliament from 2002 to 2014, when he switched sides to support the Russian proxy forces seeking to secede from Ukraine. In 2014 he became the speaker of the parliament of “Novorossiya,” a short-lived confederation of the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist governments that had been endorsed by the Kremlin and openly sought an annexation into Russia.
Tsaryov is wanted by Ukraine on charges of separatism. He is the latest of a number of Russian nationalists and pro-Russian Ukrainians to be targeted in assassination attempts. Some of the attacks are believed to have links to Ukrainian intelligence.
The Washington Post reported this month that the CIA had helped fund new departments in Ukraine’s SBU and GUR military intelligence agencies that had carried out assassinations on prominent fighters and politicians.
They included the car bombing near Moscow that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of the Russian far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin, as well as the deaths of senior Russian commanders in Ukraine and the fatal shooting of a Russian submarine captain who had revealed his location online using the fitness app Strava.
