The mayor of the city of Dniprorudne (Zaporizhzhia region) Yevhen Matveev died in Russian captivity.
This was reported by the head of the Zaporizhzhia Military Administration Ivan Fedorov.
According to him, the Russians occupied Dniprorudne at the end of February 2022, when the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine began. After that, Matveev stayed in the city, ensured the life of the community and constantly informed the population about the course of events, Fedorov emphasizes.
Not long after the occupation of the city, the Russian military took Matveev prisoner, he spent 2 years and 8 months there. The man was tortured, and the body was returned during the last exchange.
Occupation of the Zaporizhzhia region
After a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian occupation forces captured most of the territory of the Zaporizhzhia region. On February 26, 2022, after battles with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the occupiers entered the 150 000-strong Melitopol. The occupiers could not take the regional center of Zaporizhzhia, so they decided to make Melitopol the "capital" of the temporarily occupied part of the region and held a pseudo-referendum there on the "joining" of the region to the Russian Federation.
In October last year, Ivan Fedorov reported that almost 600 civilians of the Zaporizhzhia region are currently in Russian captivity. These are officially registered cases.
For more news and in-depth stories from Ukraine please follow us on X.