Kateryna Gubareva, the wife of the founder of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, did not disappear, as her husband announced earlier on Wednesday, but was arrested by the authorities on corruption charges.

“The Ministry of Internal Affairs detained Kateryna Gubareva, Deputy Head of the Government of Kherson Oblast for Digitization and Social Policy, in the case of an economic crime,” law enforcement agencies reported.

The Russian state press agency also stated that the local authorities of Kherson refused to confirm or deny the information provided by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow.

This was reported by Max Seddon, the head of the Moscow bureau of the Financial Times, on his Twitter page, who noted the irony of the fact that Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian troops were annexed by Russia less than two months after the first arrests. local officials of the occupation authorities have already begun.

It will be recalled that Meduza investigative journalists, who were the first to state in June that Vladimir Putin wants to annex all occupied Ukrainian territories, not just Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which he used as a pretext for the invasion, wrote that Moscow plans to close local officials due to fears, that they can transfer funds allocated to these regions.

However, for now, the Kremlin has left the heads of the “civilian-military” authorities, installed by them in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk, in their positions.

What the founder of the DPR said about the disappearance of his wife

Pavlo Gubarev reported on Wednesday in his Telegram channel that his wife, who was appointed by the Russian occupiers as the deputy head of the administration of the Kherson region, disappeared on Tuesday afternoon.

Gubarev also said that she was last seen near the government building in Genitsk, where the Russian occupation authorities set up their “temporary capital” on Saturday, a day after the withdrawal from the west bank of the Dnieper was completed and the city of Kherson was abandoned.

Volodymyr Saldo, acting head of the Kherson “military-civilian” administration, also tried to call Gubareva to find out where she was, but she did not answer, according to her husband.

Pavlo Gubarev was known in Ukraine as a prominent pro-Russian activist before the illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014, when Gubarev declared himself the “people’s governor” of Donetsk region after pro-Russian separatists took over the local regional council.

He was later ousted by other separatist leaders, such as Denys Pushylin, the current head of the Russian-installed administration in this region of eastern Ukraine, and barred from participating in parliamentary elections allegedly organized by pro-Russian rebels.

Shortly after declaring himself a “people’s governor” in March 2014, he was arrested by the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine. But only two months later, he was released in exchange for SBU officers arrested by Donbas separatist fighters.

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