An officer of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Chief Intelligence Directorate, Col. Maksym Shapoval, was killed in a car explosion in Kyiv's Solomensky district on Tuesday morning, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on its website.

"National Police officers, rescuers, bomb disposal experts and criminologists are working at the scene of the incident, which has been qualified as a terrorist act. Measures are being taken to establish all circumstances of the tragedy. The leadership of the Defense Ministry and the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces sends its profound condolences to the family of the serviceman killed," the ministry said.

Censor.NET online newspaper editor-in-chief Yuriy Butusov said that Shapoval headed the special reserve department of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Chief Intelligence Directorate. This unit was actively involved in hostilities in Donbas, including in "the temporarily occupied territories," the journalist wrote on his Facebook account.

The Ukrayinska Pravda online newspaper said earlier on Tuesday, citing its own sources, that the head of one of the Chief Intelligence Directorate's special operations departments had been killed in an explosion in Kyiv.

Ukrainian Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko, for his part, said that a current serviceman of the Ukrainian armed forces had been killed in this car blast.

The Ukrainian National Police branch for Kyiv had confirmed earlier that one person was killed in the car explosion in Kyiv's Solomiansky district and a woman was injured by dispersion of fragments.