The death of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was staged by Ukraine’s SBU security service to gather more evidence of the Kremlin’s plans to murder its critics, the man allegedly hired to assassinate Babchenko, Oleksiy Tsymbaliuk, has said in an interview with the BBC.
Tsymbaliuk, a former Christian Orthodox monk and veteran of the war in eastern Ukraine, said in an interview published by the BBC on June 10 that he had alerted authorities as soon as his acquaintance Borys Herman tried to hire him to kill Babchenko in early April.
After that, the SBU put Herman under surveillance and used Tsymbaliuk to find out more about the planned murder. The operation culminated on May 29, when SBU, with help of Tsymbaliuk and Babchenko himself, staged Babchenko’s murder in his Kyiv apartment. On the next day, the SBU arrested Herman and revealed the murder was a sting operation to arrest the organizer.
SBU shared very few details about the operation, leaving many blank spots and unanswered questions: Why did they need to go that far and stage the murder? How did they stage it? Who knew about the operation?
Tsymbaliuk, who came out as Babchenko’s pretend assassin on the next day, answered some of the hanging questions in his BBC interview.
Tsymbaliuk said the whole operation had been designed to discover two things: the list of people targeted by the Kremlin for assassination in Ukraine, and the identity of those who were to pay for the contract killings.
However, Tsymbaliuk said the operation failed to meet its goals, as the main suspect Herman’s sudden decision to leave the country forced Ukraine’s authorities to arrest him before he handed over the entire sum of cash for Babchenko’s “killing.”
It also meant the SBU failed to obtain the entire list of assassination targets or find out who was paying for the killings. Still, the SBU said it had the list of 47 potential targets, which Tsymbaliuk presumes they got from Herman’s communication with his contacts in Russia.
Tsymbaliuk said he heard from Herman of a list of 30 people who he wanted to get assassinated by autumn of 2018, but later he said the list grew to include 60 names. Tsymbaliuk did not see the list.
“It would be illogical for (Herman) to show it to me,” he said. “They had to see my job first, and then we would talk about the list.”
Herman also never spoke of who hired him to organize the assassinations, according to Tsymbaliuk.
Nevertheless, Tsymbaliuk reckoned the operation was a success.
“I don’t think the authorities made any mistakes,” Tsymbaliuk told the BBC. “Things don’t always go the way you plan. That’s life. A serious network that could have caused a lot of evil has collapsed, it’s been neutralized. It’s a success.”
The SBU operation has still not ended, and the authorities will soon give more information, revealing “how big a hydra we knocked down,” he added.
Oleksiy Tsymbaliuk, the man allegedly hired to assassinate Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv, poses for a picture wearing a uniform of Pravy Sector, the far-right Ukrainian nationalist political party and movement.
Tsymbaliuk denied that Herman had been working undercover for another SBU department, as Herman had claimed in the court after his arrest.
“Herman’s phones, of course, were tapped, and it would be clear if he was working for another department. In the end, when he says that he was working for counterintelligence, he doesn’t even know the names of the departments. He’s just babbling some nonsense, that’s it,” Tsymbaliuk said.
Tsymbaliuk fought in the war in 2014, and was a member of the far-right Ukrainian nationalist political party and movement Pravy Sector. There, in search for ammunition for the army, he met Herman in 2015, whose firm Schmeisser sold weapons and had a long-standing business relationship with the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. Later, Herman tried to recruit Tsymbaliuk.
“I was very interested in this — not in terms of getting a job. I understood that such things happen for the purpose of provocations,” Tsymbaliuk said. “Provocations during the war in Ukraine can result in a terrible disaster and terrible grief. Accordingly, I showed interest in order to learn more.”
Tsymbaliuk said he thought that Herman picked him for the job because he thought Tsymbaliuk was easy to manipulate due to his far-right views.
“Many people think that the far-right are easy to manipulate,” he said. “Like it’s enough to say that the job is to kill a Russian, and they’d go for it no matter who this Russian is.”
Today Tsymbaliuk says he is being protected by the SBU.
“Of course, I understand that after all of this (those who ordered the killings) would like to kill me as well,” Tsymbaliuk said. “Sooner or later we all will die. The main thing is how valuable your life has been. I think that I have already completed a certain mission.”
