The so-called governor of the occupied Kherson region, Volodymyr Saldo, appointed Semen Mashkautsan as the head of the pseudo-government.
This was reported by media controlled by the Russian Federation.
Prior to this, the occupation Duma of the Kherson region supported Mashkautsan’s candidacy, approving the decision regarding his appointment. After that, Saldo received the formal right to appoint the head of the occupation government.
As MOST previously wrote, Moscow resident Semen Maushkatsan became deputy to the occupation head of government as early as August 2022, while Volodymyr Saldo was in a coma after poisoning.
Not much is known about him. Mashkautsan graduated from M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the Russian Foreign Ministry. He is a participant in a managerial personnel development reserve program.
Since 2015 he has held leadership positions within the system of federal executive bodies, six of those years working at the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.
He worked as an assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation and headed the Department of Metallurgy and Materials of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.
Interestingly, the occupation government of the Kherson region operated without a head for almost a year.
MOST wrote about the disappearance of Andriy Alekseienko at the beginning of 2025.
Since the beginning of the year he stopped signing documents, and soon his portrait and surname were removed from the occupation administration’s website.
The Russians and local collaborators did not comment on the disappearance of their official. Later we found traces of him in Tyumen.
In 2021, before being sent to the Kherson region, Alekseienko was the mayor of Krasnodar and became involved in a corruption scandal: he was suspected of receiving a bribe of 1.5 million rubles in the form of an elite Perazzi shotgun. A video of his interrogation even appeared online. The case then died down, and, according to rumors, thanks to the support of the governor of Kuban, Veniamin Kondratyev, he retained his position for several more months.