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Ex-'Mayor' Of Separatist-Controlled Town Was Ukraine Informant
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service November 25, 2019
KYIV – The former "mayor" of Horlivka, a town in the Donetsk region controlled by Russian-backed separatists, has been a Ukrainian military intelligence agent.
A spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's military intelligence, Vadym Skibitskiy, said on November 25 that Eduard Matyukha for five years had provided Kyiv with data on the situation in the territories Ukraine doesn't control in the eastern region of Donetsk.
Matyukha said a day earlier that he returned to Ukraine-controlled territory after carrying out intelligence activities in separatist-controlled Horlivka, an industrial town which had a pre-war population of approximately 267,000 people.
Matyukha was briefly mayor for an unspecified period because a conflict erupted between rival militant groups that partly was one of his alleged assignments to cause.
However, he gained the trust of the pro-Russian separatists and became the first secretary of the Communist Party in Horlivka, Skibitskiy said.
He managed to establish contacts with the Communist Party of Russia and through those links managed to clarify their role in Russia's policy toward Ukraine's eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where some districts have bene controlled by the separatists since April 2014.
Kyiv-Moscow ties have been tense after Russian illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and incited separatism in Ukraine's east, where more than 13,000 people were killed in the ongoing conflict since 2014.
Before the war and until November 2013, Matyukha was the first deputy mayor of Horlivka.
Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
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