The exiled mayor of a southern Ukrainian city told Newsweek Wednesday that Russian collaborators in occupied territories can either face the courts in Ukraine or possibly be killed by Russian troops when they are no longer needed.
"Russian soldiers will not give them the opportunity to run away," Ivan Fedorov, the exiled mayor of Melitopol in southern Ukraine, told Newsweek Wednesday. "When they see they don't need these collaborators, they will clean them [out]. They will kill them."
Fedorov told the publication that one collaborator, Kirill Stemousov, who was the Russia-appointed head of the Kherson region, fled to Russia and that another collaborator appointed to run his city of Melitopol, Yevehn Balytsky, ran to Crimea during a recent increase in Ukrainian military strikes.
"It's a great start when collaborators from Melitopol try to run to Crimea," Fedorov said in the article. "And it's a great signal that all other collaborators will try to do the same thing."
The mayor, now staying near the front lines in the city of Zaporizhzhia, said last month that he had a list of 500 collaborators in his city alone. Ukrainian authorities have identified more than 1,000 across the country.
According to the report, while Russian security has previously been linked to "unexplained deaths" of local officials in parts of the Donbas region occupied by Russia since 2014, there is no evidence they are looking to exterminate collaborators now.
In July, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy began a "purge" of suspected collaborators from the country's security services, including the removal of one of his childhood friends, Ivan Bakanov, as head of the Security Service of Ukraine, U.S. News and World Report reported.
During a speech at the time, Zelenskyy pointed out the arrest of one of Bakanov's appointees, Oleh Kulinich, for suspected treason, according to the report.
He also removed top prosecutor Iryna Venediktova during the July purge. He stated that authorities were investigating 651 cases of treason and collaboration, including 60 cases involving people in both Bakanov's and Venediktova's agencies.
"The decision on Bakanov was forced," Volodymyr Fesenko, a Kyiv-based analyst told the outlet in July. "This is a crisis decision. They need to bring in order, to purge the SBU and search for ... agents. Not only in the SBU of course, but the SBU is critically important."
It is not just Russian troops and Ukrainian authorities that suspected collaborators need to fear, according to the Newsweek report, but pro-Ukrainians in the occupied areas that may want to dispense their own justice.
"Every day our partisans and our military make it a hard situation for the Russians," Fedorov said of the occupied south. "Our partisans destroyed six cars from the FSB when they stopped for the evening. I don't know how many were wounded or killed."
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