80 thousand euros and anti-personnel mines for the (foiled) attack

Yet another plot to kill Volodymyr Zelensky this time was hatched within the same secret services tasked with defending him. The plan foiled by Kiev, the latest of a dozen attempts to eliminate the Ukrainian leader, however appears to be the most sophisticated hatched by Moscow so far. And according to the Ukrainian 007s it was supposed to be the most welcome gift for Putin on the day of his fifth inauguration. Two colonels of the Ukrainian security service SBU were arrested on charges of being part of a network of moles ready to attack not only the president but also the head of the SBU himself, Vasyl Malyuk, and the head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov .

The attack

“It is the first time that two high-ranking officers are paid by Moscow,” underlined the service spokesman, Artem Dehtiarenko. The two soldiers now face life imprisonment for high treason and planning a terrorist attack. It is not clear how extensive the network of spies nested in the Ukrainian state apparatus was, and whether the hunt for accomplices is still open. Since 2022, over 2,500 Ukrainians have been investigated for treason, and another 500 people have been accused of providing the Russians with strategic directions for the deadly bombings of military bases and troops.

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Plan

The plan foiled in recent days involved eliminating Zelensky by recruiting soldiers responsible for the president’s personal security, who were supposed to take him hostage and then kill him. For Budanov, however, an ambush with a precision missile was hypothesized, which would have been followed by a drone attack and possibly the use of anti-tank grenades to eliminate any survivors. One of the two colonels who ended up in handcuffs was said to have had the role of supplying weapons to the undercover agents, including explosive charges and anti-personnel mines. The attack was supposed to take place before Orthodox Easter, May 5th. In an audio, one of the two arrested confessed to having received up to 80,000 dollars in cash or paid into family accounts, the BBC reported. «Only a small circle of people knew about the operation to unmask enemy agents», revealed Malyuk, who was also the target of the plot: «The attack was supposed to be a gift to Putin for the inauguration», underlined the responsible.

The spy network

According to Kiev, the spy network had been set up since before the start of the conflict, which began in February 2022. Three Russian secret agents were pulling the strings of the plot: one of them, indicated by the name of Dmytro Perlin, « he had been recruiting moles since before the invasion.” Another, a certain Oleksiy Kornev, would have met with one of the senior officers arrested “in a neighboring EU state” shortly before the Russian attack on Ukraine. It is not the first time that Kiev foils a plan to kill its leader, who was included only a few days ago – on May 4th – on the wanted list of the Russian Interior Ministry: a month ago a Pole was arrested on charges of being in cahoots with Moscow to assassinate Zelensky. Last year, however, it was August, a plot to kill the president was foiled with a massive aerial bombing: a woman acted as a lookout to hit him during a visit to Ochakov, but she failed to send the information in time. The best known of the assassination attempts remains that of the Chechen special forces commando sent to Kiev by Ramzan Kadyrov, who, even before the start of hostilities, received orders from Putin himself to eliminate the entire Ukrainian leadership during a face to face with the Kremlin tsar

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