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Ukraine hit back in its shadow war with Russia this weekend by “eliminating” two operatives allegedly responsible for the most prominent targeted killing in Kyiv since Moscow’s full-scale invasion began.
The operation followed the killing of Ukrainian Col Ivan Voronych in broad daylight on Thursday, which sent a chill through Kyiv and marked the latest in an escalating battle between Ukraine’s and Russia’s vast and powerful state intelligence agencies.
Voronych, a veteran of Ukraine’s intelligence services and senior figure in the SBU’s elite special forces Alpha unit — a rough equivalent to the UK’s Special Air Service and the US Delta Force — was shot point blank near his home as he walked to his car.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the country’s main domestic intelligence agency, said on Sunday that it had tracked down two Russian intelligence operatives who went into hiding following the killing. The operation was personally overseen by the agency’s head Lt Gen Vasyl Maliuk.
The pair of assassins — a man and a woman — allegedly carried out the murder under orders from Russia’s FSB, according to an SBU statement. The agency said they were located in the Kyiv region and killed during a gunfight on Sunday morning. It did not disclose their names.
Ukrainian media named the shooter and his partner and reported they were both citizens of Azerbaijan. The Ukrainian news site Censor said they had entered Ukraine via Moldova in May. The FT could not independently confirm that information. Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry and embassy in Kyiv did not respond to requests for comment.
A video of Maliuk at the scene showed him standing over the bodies of the two alleged assassins, who lay prone in a grassy area. With assistance from national police, the SBU had identified the suspects through surveillance and counter-intelligence measures, Maliuk said. The investigation found the operatives had monitored Voronych’s routine before receiving a weapon from an FSB handler in Kyiv.
Russian officials have not commented on the killing and did not respond to a request for comment. But Kremlin-aligned military bloggers celebrated the killing of Voronych on Telegram.
Voronych had been involved in covert operations against Russian targets, including sabotage missions and cross-border raids deep inside Russian-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, according to SBU officials close to him. One such operation, they said, killed the senior Russian forces commander in Donetsk Arsen Pavlov, known by his call sign, Motorola, in October 2016.
The SBU colleagues said Voronych was key to the success of Ukraine’s shadow war efforts against Russia and had co-ordinated at times with western intelligence services, including the CIA.
In December, an SBU bombing in Moscow killed Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s radioactive, chemical and biological defence forces, and his assistant, as they exited a building.
Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service last month carried out one of its most far-reaching operations of the war. Dubbed Operation Spiderweb, it smuggled and then deployed more than 100 small drones to strike four airfields deep inside Russia. The sites housed strategic bombers used in long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities.
Russia’s FSB has in the past year stepped up its recruitment of young and vulnerable Ukrainians to conduct espionage and sabotage inside their own country, sometimes turning them into unwitting suicide bombers.
In the years after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and leading up to Moscow’s full-scale invasion, a string of assassinations in Kyiv and outside the capital — including that of a former prominent Russian MP — were attributed to the Kremlin’s spy agencies.
The SBU and Ukraine’s secret service have claimed to have foiled numerous Russian assassination attempts since 2022 against President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other senior officials. Zelenskyy has admitted to knowing of at least 10 such plots targeting him.
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