Officers of the State Security Service (SBU) of Ukraine have detained in Kyiv a man who had been recruited by Russia’s FSB to assassinate Ukrainian civil activists in order to destabilize the situation in the country in view of the upcoming presidential elections.
“Members of our counterintelligence found out that special services of the aggressor state were planning to commit several acts of terror in Ukraine aimed at well-known civil activists. For this purpose, the FSB recruited an internally displaced lady from Donbas who did the job of finding a candidate to do the killings. In exchange for receiving a Russian passport, the lady suggested that her former husband be recruited as the killer. The fee for a kill was one thousand dollars, and one of the top managers of a regional political organization in Kherson was chosen as the first target. However, a fiasco awaited the Russian special services,” a statement published by the SBU’s press center on Nov. 16 says.
Thus, SBU claims it prevented this crime. Since the contractor was under surveillance by Ukrainian special agents, he was located and live rounds in his gun were secretly replaced with blank ones.
“Thus, the agents acted proactively, just like in the case with the imitation of the murder of Russian journalists Arkadiy Babchenko”, says SBU.
The Ukrainian agents continued to keep an eye on the further steps by the killer to confirm his ties with the FSB.
“The failure” with the first murder did not ruin the plans of “Russia’s competent authorities,” and the killer was given a new assignment in Moscow to murder another leader of a Kherson-based non-governmental organization. While he was making arrangements for this crime, the Ukrainian law enforcement officers detained him in the Ukrainian capital. Now the thug has been informed that he is being charged with a crime and he has been taken into custody as a prevention measure,” the statement says.
