In the war against Ukraine on March 17, a collaborator, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) department, Major General Volodymyr Lyapkin, was killed.
This is reported by the Russian “Mediazona”. The first to report Lyapkinʼs death was a collaborator and former MP from the “Party of Regions” Oleh Tsaryov, and later "Mediazona" was able to independently confirm this.
Lyapkin was the head of the operational documentation department in SBU. His area of responsibility was wiretapping, external surveillance, and information collection. Lyapkin received the rank of major general in 2013.
Tsaryov claims that he personally participated in the dispersal of protests during the Revolution of Dignity. In February 2014, immediately after the victory of the Maidan, Lyapkin was dismissed from SBU — then he settled in the occupied Crimea.
After the start of a full-scale war and the occupation of Kherson, the traitor became the deputy head of the “State Security Service of the Kherson region”. The founder of “State Security” was Lyapkin’s former boss Oleksandr Yakymenko, who headed SBU from January 2013 to February 2014, and then fled to the Russian Federation. For some time, Lyapkin served as the head of “State Security”.
Vladimir Lyapkin.
In March 2025, SBU reported Lyapkin on suspicion of collaborationism. Investigators claimed that he was engaged in “filtration activities” and committed repressions against the civilian population. After the formal liquidation of the “State Security Service” (i.e. after the so-called “annexation” of the Kherson region to Russia in September 2022), its successor was the FSB Directorate for the occupied Kherson region.
The Center for Investigative Journalism wrote that Lyapkinʼs general rank was preserved. Tsarev also wrote that Lyapkin remained a major general in the Russian special services, and then served in the Bars-33 unit under the call sign "Baty".
The Russian social network “VKontakte” also published an obituary dedicated to the death of two graduates of the Tashkent Higher Combined Arms Command School — Vladimir Lyapkin and former employee of the Russian Emergencies Ministry Eduard Malov (he died with Lyapkin). They both graduated from the school in 1989.
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