A car bomb exploded in Kyiv’s Solomyanskiy district early on June 27.
The victim, Colonel Maksym Shapoval, was an officer in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Intelligence Department and commanded a deep reconnaissance division engaged in collecting evidence about Russia’s formal involvement in the armed aggression in Donbas, and which was set to be presented before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, according to the Ukrainian news portal LB.ua.
While an investigation is still under way, Ukrainian officials suspect Russian involvement, according to Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoliy Matios.
We remind readers that in March, another Ukrainian state security service officer – Lieutenant Colonel Oleksandr Kharaberiush, deputy chief of the regional counterintelligence department in Donetsk Oblast – was killed in a very similar car explosion in the eastern port city of Mariupol. Ukrainian officials blamed Russian-backed separatists for orchestrating Kharaberiush’s murder.
Ukrainian officials also suspect Russian intelligence was involved in the June 27 assassination of Shapoval. Earlier we reported that the preliminary results of the Interior Ministry’s investigation into the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet appear to tentatively confirm previous assessments by Ukrainian officials that the Russian government may have also been complicit in his assassination – implying continued Russian subterfuge inside of Ukraine in general, and not only in the war in the east.
Ukrainian officials also widely claimed that the assassination in March of ex-Russian member of parliament Denis Voronenkov, who was set to testify in the treason trial of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych (and who purportedly had evidence of Russian involvement in the Euromaidan Revolution), was ordered by the Russian government, while U.S. Senator John McCain – who is very close to the current Ukrainian presidential administration – also claimed Kremlin collusion in the murder. The timeline of Voronenkov’s killer’s prolonged stay in Russia seems to lend at least some credence to this theory.
Lastly, just several weeks ago, a Chechen man, Adam Osmayev, accused of plotting a previous assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin (and whom Russia failed to extradite), and his wife Amina Okuyeva, were shot during an assassination attempt in Kyiv’s downtown Podil district. Osmayev and Okuyeva were volunteer fighters in the war in Donbas. The gunman was purported to be a gangster from St. Petersburg, known as Artur Denisultanov-Kurmakaev, nicknamed “Dingo,” who allegedly murdered an ex-bodyguard of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
On the back of the murders of Sheremet, Kharaberiush, Voronenkov, Shapoval and the recent assassination attempt on Osmayev’s life, we have noticed another alarming trend developing quickly in the country: a wave of contract-style killings in Ukraine has clearly set in – a trend very much akin to the wave which took place in Russia throughout the 1990s, when random street assassinations occurred frequently.
Prior to the onset of hostilities with Russian-backed militants in 2014, street killings in Ukraine were very rare; and car bomb assassinations were totally unheard of, unlike now – which display a strangely Middle Eastern character.
Local readers, while not directly threatened by Shapoval’s murder, are reminded that there exists a conflict of interest between the internal stability of Ukraine and the geopolitical ambitions of the Russian Federation: Russian interference inside Ukraine, if true, has the objective of destabilizing Ukraine – politically, socially, economically and militarily. It seems clear that Russia seeks Ukraine’s internal collapse to safeguard its influence in Ukraine and its political and military dominance in the region. Awareness of this central fact is key, and all readers should exercise added vigilance in the wake of the recent rise in contract-style killings.
Basil J. Papan is Ukraine country analyst for Mozayix, an Arlington, Virginia-based security and training company founded and staffed by experienced military and security professionals. Papan can be reached at [email protected]
