Last March, Volodymyr Zelensky said he had escaped “more than ten” Russian assassination attempts. He can now add one more, and not the least. The Ukrainian intelligence services (SBU) announced on Tuesday May 7 that they had “dismantled a network of agents” of the Russian secret services (FSB) who were preparing “the assassination of the Ukrainian president”.
At the heart of this plot, we find “two colonels” from the Ukrainian state service, responsible for ensuring the security of public officials. According to the SBU, the latter had been recruited by Moscow even before the Russian invasion of 2022. In a video broadcast by kyiv, a man identified as one of the two colonels, his face blurred, describes the details of the operation. He was to recommend to the FSB a person ready to “block” the president, probably when the latter was going to record his daily evening speech. The objective, as the SBU reveals, was to identify those close to Volodymyr Zelensky’s security, likely to “take him hostage” and “kill him” subsequently.
Several Ukrainian “senior representatives” were also targeted by the FSB’s maneuvers, such as the head of military intelligence Kyrylo Boudanov and that of the SBU Vassyl Maliouk. The two Ukrainian colonels working on behalf of Moscow were “arrested a few days ago,” a source within the Ukrainian security forces told AFP. “They were really high-ranking men, one of them was the head of a department,” she added. The suspects are accused of “high treason” and “preparations for a terrorist attack”, and risk life imprisonment. Faced with this nevertheless very concrete threat, Volodymyr Zelensky also chose to dismiss the head of his personal security, Sergei Leonidovich Rud.
A foiled attempt in Poland last April
This assassination attempt is far from the first targeting the Ukrainian head of state. Only last April, it was on Polish soil that a man was arrested, accused of “collecting and providing information to the military intelligence services of the Russian Federation […]in particular helping the Russian secret services to plan a possible assassination attempt” against Volodymyr Zelensky, said a press release from the Polish prosecutor’s office.
The Russian intelligence agent, a Polish national, had been tasked with “collecting and transmitting to the aggressor state information on the security of Rzeszów-Jasionka airport,” the Ukrainian prosecutor general said. This airport, in the south-east of Poland, was far from being a trivial choice: it is through which the Ukrainian president often passes during his trips abroad. This foiled attempt also demonstrated that Moscow did not hesitate to broaden its field of action outside Ukraine, but also in Poland, a member country of the European Union and NATO.
Regular threats during his travels
The Ukrainian intelligence services have communicated relatively little on the “dozen” other assassination attempts foiled against Volodymyr Zelensky. However, during several trips near the front, the Ukrainian president was the more or less direct target of Russian air attacks. As last March, when visiting the port of Odessa with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Russian strikes caused five deaths within “300 meters” of the two leaders, the Ukrainian president then described to the Italian television channel Rai.
The Russian secret services have also already gone further in their desire to make an attempt on the life of the Ukrainian head of state during his official trips. Like last summer, when he went to the Mykolaiv region, near the front line. Ukrainian intelligence then announced that it had arrested a woman, suspected of “collecting information on the president’s planned visit” and transmitting it to the Russian secret services with a view to a “massive air attack”.
This woman, who worked in a store on a military base, had notably tried “to establish the time and the list of places of the provisional itinerary of the Head of State in the region”, but also to obtain information on the location of Ukrainian electronic warfare systems and ammunition warehouses. She was finally arrested “in flagrante delicto” while trying to transmit her information to the Russian secret services. A method that resembles that used during the last assassination attempt in recent days. But which again had been foiled in time by Ukrainian internal intelligence, far from being overwhelmed by the situation.
However, even if this were to succeed, and Volodymyr Zelensky were to perish, everything would have already been prepared in Ukraine to ensure the continuation. “The Ukrainians have plans in place – which I won’t talk about or go into detail about – to ensure what we would call ‘continuity of government’ in one way or another,” had thus assured the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken from 2022. According to the Ukrainian Constitution, it is in particular the President of Parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, who is supposed to take on the interim role.