The second close aide to Vladimir Putin in two days has narrowly cheated death after being targeted by Ukrainian fire.
Sergey Kiriyenko is a former Russian prime minister who is now deputy chief of staff in the Kremlin and a very close crony to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The brute was giving awards to fighters in the Somalia Battalion, a separatist military unit of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic [DPR] when he had to flee to a bunker.
All UN member states, apart from Russia, consider the DPR to still legally be a part of Ukraine and not an independent Russian state.
Syria became the first country to formally recognise the two parts of Ukraine as independent republics.
The shelling continued after Kiriyenko, 60, and DPR leader Denis Pushilin, 41, retreated to the bunker.
The Kremlin chief was shown a fragment of a shell from the “massive” incoming fire.
“It’s still hot,” he said, adding that the 152mm self-propelled howitzer attack was “right before our eyes”.
Pushilin was present two days earlier when another Putin henchman, speaker of the Russian parliament Vyacheslav Volodin, “miraculously” survived a US-supplied HIMARS missile strike. The missile hit an administration building just seven minutes after the top Moscow politician ended his speech.
Both Kiriyenko and Volodin have been tipped as possible future Putin successors.
“As soon as the [Kiriyenko and Pushilin] cortege drove up to the [Somalia] unit, massive shelling began,” reported the pro-Moscow war WarGonzo Telegram channel.
“The personnel of the unit and the leaders managed to quickly move to a bomb shelter. Despite this, the awards ceremony took place in a relaxed and warm atmosphere", it continued.
Shelling could still be heard as the awards were given.
Last month Kiriyenko was targeted on a visit to Nova Kakhovka in the occupied Kherson region.
A three-missile attack was launched, raising questions about whether Ukraine had intelligence about his visit.
He served as prime minister for five months under ex-president Boris Yeltsin in 1998 and was later head of Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear energy corporation.
Putin is using him currently to establish Russian administrations in invaded territories of Ukraine, yet a concerted fightback from Kyiv's forces is making this task difficult.
He uses his Ukrainian mother’s surname.
