Two high-ranking collaborators were supposed to have organized assassinations against the top government in Kiev. The plot was discovered, and the question arises for Ukraine: How far does Moscow’s long arm reach?
At the beginning of the week, the Ukrainians said they had managed a significant blow against a Russian network in the country. As the domestic secret service SBU reported on Tuesday, he thwarted advanced attack plans against leading figures in the Ukrainian state. President Volodymyr Zelensky should have been murdered, as well as SBU director Vasil Malyuk and Kirilo Budanov, the head of military intelligence.
In a twelve-minute video, the SBU presented its investigation results in detail: According to this, the Russian secret service FSB recruited at least two colonels of the agency responsible for protecting the president and high-ranking officials. They were arrested. Someone was supposed to find someone among Zelensky’s guards who would kidnap and murder the president. Another agent received instructions from the FSB to kill Budanov in a recorded telephone conversation.
A “sandwich” with rockets and a drone
While the plans to attack Zelenskiy sound somewhat vague, Budanov was supposed to have been killed shortly before Orthodox Easter last Sunday – according to SBU director Malyuk, “as a gift for Putin on his inauguration.” One of the colonels had already equipped an agent he had recruited with an explosives-laden drone and a mine. The SBU seized the weapons during a house search after observing the officer for a long period of time. This one is confessed.
The recording of the conversation shows that the alleged Russian FSB agent Dmitri Perlin found out Budanov’s whereabouts. He instructed his Ukrainian agent to watch the house and immediately report the intelligence chief’s arrival via text message. The Russians would then attack his entourage with a rocket. The agent should observe this and use a drone to kill the survivors. Then another rocket covers the tracks. “We’re making a sandwich: rocket – ‘bird’ – rocket,” Perlin summarized the plan, where “bird” is slang for “drone.” He promised the man at least $50,000 reward.
The extensive information policy is very unusual for the SBU, which tends to be secretive. Although the authenticity of the recordings is difficult to verify, the plot seems plausible. The attack plans are by no means the first to come to light. Their thwarting is indeed a success for Kiev’s counterintelligence agency. But they give an idea of how far Russia’s arm reaches into Ukraine, even after more than two years of war.
It is not surprising that Zelenskiy and Budanov are in the Russian sights. Only a few days ago, Moscow put out a wanted notice for the president and officially classified the intelligence chief as a “terrorist and extremist”. Former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, who always appears particularly forceful, recently said that Zelenskiy would “hardly live to old age”. That sounds like a threat, although the Kremlin officially emphasizes that it has no plans to murder the Ukrainian.
A dozen attacks on Zelensky
Zelensky himself said in an interview that he had survived at least five assassination attempts, and according to the newspaper “The Independent” there are over a dozen. “The first time it was very interesting,” explained the president, “later it’s like Covid.” You get used to it. It was only in mid-April that Polish police arrested a man who allegedly wanted to kill Zelensky on behalf of Russia. Budanov also survived several attacks. In one he was seriously injured. In addition, unknown people poisoned his wife last November. The only reason she didn’t suffer any permanent damage was because she quickly sought medical help.
The demonstrative calmness in dealing with such assassination attempts shows that they are now almost part of everyday life. It is also used as a means of war by the Ukrainian military intelligence service, which murdered several collaborators and Kremlin propagandists. Budanov likes to compare the approach to that of the Mossad. However, those killed by the Ukrainians were never as prominent as those whom Moscow was now apparently targeting.
The plans are therefore likely to cause unrest in the background. There is nothing to suggest that the news spread in Russian channels about a “purge” within the agency responsible for protecting the president. But the question for Kiev is how Moscow was able to recruit two high-ranking officers in such an important agency.
The problem of infiltration has been known for at least ten years: At that time, after the Maidan revolution, several thousand secret service employees in the SBU alone fled to Russia. A decade earlier, with the poisoning of the future pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine experienced for the first time how mercilessly Moscow treats those it sees as enemies in its backyard.
The FSB’s misjudgments
Since 2014, Ukraine, with the help of its Western allies, has been making major efforts to purge the secret services of Russian agents. However, the Russians, specifically the Fifth Department of the FSB, also increased their efforts to infiltrate.
According to experts such as Hristo Grosev from the investigative platform Bellingcat, on the eve of the invasion, Moscow set up cells in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, among other places, in order to quickly liquidate Zelensky and the rest of the state leadership. They failed. The fact that the FSB had generally completely underestimated the war enemy’s willingness to resist further weakened it, at least temporarily.
The Russians’ networks have hardly collapsed completely, but assessing their reach remains difficult. The SBU says it has identified over 2,000 people who have committed treason since February 2022. However, the group contains a wide range of people, from professional agents to villagers who reveal the location of an army position in exchange for money.
Until recently, the secret service also managed to slip through the net the colonel who has now been arrested and who, according to his own statements, had been working with the Russians since 2014. The latest murder plans could be related to the generally increasing activity of the FSB, which various EU states are also noticing with concern. Or, as a source in Kiev suggested to the Guardian, it could be due to the initiative of some middle managers in the FSB who wanted to impress the Kremlin chief – in time for his re-inauguration.