An election official in the Russia-occupied city of Berdiansk has been killed after being targeted with a car bomb.

Svitlana Samoilenko, who served as the Russian-appointed deputy mayor of the city in the Zaporizhzhia Region, was killed by an improvised explosive device placed under her vehicle on March 6. 

Samoilenko was in charge of overseeing the election process in the occupied territories. The upcoming Presidential Election, due to take place on March 15-17,  will see Vladimir Putin elected for a fifth term.

"During the preparations for the pseudo-elections, Putin's Svitlana Samoilenko sought to curry favour with Muscovites: she intimidated and terrorised Berdyansk residents, forcing them to participate in illegal fake voting," said an official announcement from The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry (GUR).

In response to the bombing, Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed governor of Zaporizhzhia, condemned the incident as an attempt to intimidate pro-Russia officials and undermine their legitimate activities.

Samoilenko is not the only Russian collaborator to have been killed by car bomb in occupied Ukraine in recent days. Four days after she was targeted, Ihor Tsiferov, a former Ukrainian Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officer, was also killed by an explosive under his car. The former spook, who had defected to the Ministry of State Security of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic in 2014, was killed in the town of Dokuchaevsk in the Donetsk Region after being accused of illegal abductions, torture and other human rights violations.