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Ukraine has said it uncovered a network of Russian agents in the country that planned to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including two colonels who worked for the agency in charge of his security.
The Ukrainian domestic intelligence service (SBU) on Tuesday said the two were tasked by Moscow with finding people in Zelenskyy’s security detail who would take the president hostage and later kill him.
The agency they worked for, known as the State Protection Service, oversees security for Ukraine’s president as well as ministers and other top officials.
One of the colonels, the SBU said, had purchased weapons and drones for the operation and was recorded in conversation with his handlers at the FSB, the Russian spy agency.
In addition to Zelenskyy, the agents planned to kill the head of the SBU, Vasyl Malyuk, and the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, Kyrylo Budanov, as well as other high-ranking officials.
The kill plan for Budanov, according to the SBU, was to target a building he was in with a rocket strike and attack any people who remained in the affected area with drones. Then the Russians planned to use a second missile strike to destroy any traces of the drones, it said.
In a taped conversation published on the SBU’s website, an alleged FSB agent in Moscow tells one of the Ukrainian colonels they will receive upwards of $50,000 for the Budanov assassination.
“A limited number of people knew about our special operation, and I personally monitored its progress. The terrorist attack, which was supposed to be a gift to [Vladimir] Putin before the inauguration, was actually a failure of the Russian special services,” said Malyuk.
The SBU said the FSB had recruited the Ukrainian colonels before Russia’s full-scale invasion, meeting one of the colonels in January 2022 in a neighbouring country more than once.
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