We have previously written extensively about the “rat wars” surrounding Melitopol gauleiter Yevhen Balitsky, which include “simultaneous exposés” of his clan in the Crimean “media” and the arrests of several members of his entourage by the aggressor’s punitive forces.
Back in January, several “analytical channels” predicted, if not Balitsky’s sudden “resignation,” then the “arrest and imprisonment” of his “right-hand man,” collaborator Viktor Zubritsky, the aggressor’s “talking head,” the criminal “head of the committee on defense, interaction with law enforcement agencies, and emergencies of the regional legislative assembly” and former “creative producer” of the pro-Russian “112 Ukraine” channel in Kyiv.
Let us recall that both before and after 2014, Zubritsky and the aforementioned television channel served the business empire of the odious Minister of Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko.
And from the first months of the occupation of Crimea, Zubritsky actively and massively disseminated Russian narratives about the peninsula.
In occupied Melitopol, since 2022, Zubritsky has been actively moving goods, including weapons and drugs, as well as looted raw materials and equipment, and mass-extorting local businesses.
Zubritsky, who served as a “freelance advisor” to Crimean gauleiter Sergei Aksyonov in 2023, is establishing “commercial bridges” with the occupied peninsula using his son, Jan Zubitsky, who lived first in Slovakia and then in Moscow.
It is Zubitsky Jr. who holds the “family shares” in the “Mera” chain of stores, as well as the propaganda resource “Channel 113,” and the “Oliva” structure.
We previously demonstrated Yan Zubitsky’s connection, through “clone companies” of the same “Oliva” and the formal “company directors” Yevgeniya Nefidova and Viktor Golovko, to the “Crimean assets” of former Russian minister of agriculture and “latifundist” Oleksandr Tkachev, as well as to the corporate raids on factories in the left-bank Kherson Region.
However, the “deep basement” announced by competitors for both gauleiter Balitsky
and the Zubitsky clan has not yet materialized, but in the current new “exchange of pleasantries” between groups of Kremlin clientele, when Balitsky’s “first deputy,” Oksana Vyunik, found herself “in the crosshairs,” interesting details have emerged.
Now it’s being claimed that Balitsky actively facilitated Zubritsky Sr.’s election as a “State Duma deputy” in the fall 2026 “elections,” and this became the background to the gauleiter’s conflict with Ella Panfilova, head of the aggressor’s Central electoral commission, who is pursuing a slightly different “personnel agenda.”
The coming months will reveal how the latest round of the “war of all against all” in the “capital” of Melitopol will end.
