Mr Fifty Percent: the former Ukraine mayor doing Putin’s work in Kherson

He faced a police investigation over an alleged contract killing, but Volodymyr Saldo is now beyond the reach of Ukrainian law

The Russians were Volodymyr Saldo’s salvation. The wealthy Ukrainian in his 50s had done a stint in the national parliament and won three terms as the mayor of the southern city of Kherson, but at the start of 2022 police had opened a case against him for ordering a contract killing.

“I wanted to jail him,” says Oleksandr Prokudin, Kherson’s police chief at the time and now the city’s governor, sitting in the basement he uses for meetings since the Russians blew the roof off his office.