An official of the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kazan was killed in the Zaporozhye region

In the city of Tokmak in the Russian-controlled part of the Zaporozhye region of Ukraine, Marcel Mubarakshin, the deputy chief of the operations department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kazan, was killed in shelling. Another policeman was also killed, two were wounded. An artillery strike was carried out on the local bar “Laguna”, where the police were celebrating May Day.

The publication “Kazansky Reporter” reports that all four policemen were from Tatarstan. Several residential buildings were also damaged as a result of the shelling.

The Russian side claims that the shelling was carried out by the armed forces of Ukraine using HIMARS rocket systems. TASS, citing a representative of the local administration, reports that as a result of the shelling of Tokmak, five people were killed and fifteen wounded, all of them civilians.

Ukrainian mass media, on the contrary, write that HIMARS hit places where Russian servicemen and employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were gathered, and that the Armed Forces of Ukraine knew in advance that Russian military and policemen were relaxing in the Laguna bar.

Idel.Realii clarifies that joint police units are regularly formed in Tatarstan to travel on business trips to other regions – for example, to the North Caucasus. There is no exact data on whether such detachments are present in the occupied territories of Ukraine, however, media interlocutors do not rule out such a possibility.

• The city of Tokmak in the Zaporozhye region is under the control of the Russian military. Part of the Zaporozhye region was occupied by Russia at the beginning of the war, but its capital – the city of Zaporozhye – remains under the control of Ukraine.
• In September 2022, the President of Russia Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the accession of the Zaporozhye region to Russia. This decision is not recognized by the vast majority of countries in the world. In March 2023, Russia designated Melitopol as the capital of the occupied Zaporozhye region.