The State Security Service of Ukrainethe SBU, said it had thwarted a plan by Russia to assassinate the president of the country, Volodymyr Zelenskythis Tuesday, 7. The organization claimed to have captured Russian agents who intended to carry out an attack against the Ukrainian leader and other senior government officials.
According to the SBU, Russian agents had infiltrated the Ukrainian state guard service.
“Counterintelligence and SBU investigators thwarted the plans of FSB (Russian security service) to eliminate the President of Ukraine and other representatives of the top military and political leadership,” the Ukrainian intelligence agency said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.
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Russian agents, according to the SBU, would have looked for volunteer “executors” among Zelensky’s bodyguards who could kidnap and kill him.
The FSB, created in 1995, is the legal successor to the KGB, the spy agency of the former Soviet Union.
Assassination attempts
According to Ukrainian government officials and local media, President Zelensky survived a series of assassination and kidnapping attempts by Russian agents, or pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists, during the war in Ukraine.
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It was reported that more than 400 Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group were in Kiev in late February 2022, with orders to assassinate Zelensky and destabilize the government, so that Russia would take control of the country.
In April this year, a man was arrested in Poland on suspicion of a plot to kill the Ukrainian leader. He was reportedly in charge of gathering information about the Rzeszow-Jasionka airport, which is used by Zelensky, and was also accused of helping Russian intelligence services plan the assassination of the president of Ukraine.
Tags: Ukraine claims thwarted Russian plot assassinate Zelensky
