A TRAITOROUS Ukrainian mayor who collaborated with Vladimir Putin’s invaders has been shot dead inside Russia.
Gennady Matsegora, 46, was gunned down at his safe house during an operation thought to have been carried out by Kyiv’s military intelligence.
In the early days of Putin's brutal war Matsegora worked as mayor for the Ukrainian city of Kupiansk, in Kharkiv.
He sided with Russian invaders in February 2022, letting Vlad's troops invade the city and use it as a base as they sought to grab Kharkiv.
When Ukraine took back the territory several months later, Matsegora fled to Russia’s Belgorod region where he was given special security and a safe house in Stary Oskol.
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The Russian sympathiser was shot on Saturday while facing charges of treason in Kyiv.
He slipped into unconsciousness and stayed that way until he died in hospital on Tuesday, Mash reports.
A Ukrainian military intelligence agency source broke news of the attack soon after it happened.
Video shows ambulances and what appears to be cops gathered outside the safe house after Saturday's shooting.
Matsegora is the latest in a string of former Ukrainian officials to be killed after being branded traitors for siding with Putin.
MP Ilya Kyva, 46, once a party leader in the Kyiv parliament, was found “covered in blood” in a suspected assassination near Moscow by Ukrainian secret services.
He had become a Putin puppet who appeared as an analyst on propagandist state TV shows.
And Oleg Popov - a Ukrainian labelled a war criminal by Kyiv - was killed in an attack in Russian-occupied Luhansk.
The hit, in December last year, showed the 51-year-old's burning car after an explosion - and it came just hours after Kyva's killing.
Matsegora was facing official charges of treason in Ukraine and a probable sentence of life imprisonment for handing his city to the Russians.
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A statement from Ukraine's military intelligence (GUR) after the shooting read: “In June 2022, (Matsegora) signed the so-called protocol on the establishment of the occupation Kharkiv administration and publicly announced it.
"After the liberation of Kupiansk, he fled with the Russians to the Belgorod region, where his Moscow masters assigned Matsegora to be under heavy guard, which, however, did not protect the collaborator mayor.”
It comes as Putin’s warships and nuclear submarine are passing just 25 miles from the United States in a chilling echo of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Footage shows the tyrant's fleet engaging in war games in the Atlantic just days after it was announced that Russian warships would be sent to the Caribbean for military drills.
Desperate Vlad is also testing remote-controlled drone Z-tanks after "running out of crews" to operate Russian armoured vehicles.
With 1,270 soldiers lost on Sunday and 1,290 on Monday last week, Russia has seen its two bloodiest days of the meatgrinder war back to back.
The rampant rise in fatalities comes after the approval by Western countries for Ukraine to launch an armed attack within Russia.
Kyiv says Russian casualty figures have been above 1,000 per day since Moscow launched a new offensive in Kharkiv on May 10.
Ukrainian forces are now said to have killed 512,420 Russian troops and destroyed 7,794 tanks, 15,020 armoured combat vehicles, and 13,345 artillery pieces since the start of the war.
A humiliated Putin has now acknowledged that thousands of Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine each month in a shame-faced admission.
