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Ukrainian authorities said Tuesday that they have arrested two officers in the agency responsible for protecting senior government leaders and accused them of developing a plot to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials - as a “gift” to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his inauguration.
The two suspects were colonels in Ukraine’s State Protection Department, roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service, and were recruited by Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, according to Ukraine’s State Security Service.
The State Security Service, known as the SBU, announced the arrests in a post on the Telegram social media platform. The statement did not identify the suspects, and their faces were obscured in photos showing the arrests and in a subsequent video of an interrogation.
The colonels were tasked with providing the FSB with information about Zelensky and other top officials’ whereabouts and to recruit others who could directly help in the assassinations, the SBU said. Putin was sworn in for a fifth term as president on Tuesday in an elaborate ceremony at the Kremlin.
“One of the tasks of the FSB intelligence network was to search for operatives among the military close to the protection of the president, who could take the head of state hostage and later kill him,” the SBU wrote.
In addition to targeting Zelensky, the FSB also hoped to kill the head of the SBU, Vasyl Maliuk, and Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of the GUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the SBU said. Budanov was intended to “be eliminated” before Orthodox Easter, which was Sunday, the GUR said.
The attack on Budanov “was supposed to be a gift to Putin before the inauguration,” Maliuk said in the SBU statement. He called the operation “actually a failure of the Russian special services.”
To kill Budanov, the colonels intended to recruit an “agent” from Budanov’s security detail, who would pass on the coordinates of Budanov’s location to the FSB, the SBU said.
“A rocket attack was planned,” the SBU said. After this initial attack, the recruited agent was supposed to kill those who were still alive with a drone attack. “After that, the Russians planned to target [the location] with another missile, including to destroy traces of the use of the drone,” the SBU wrote.
The two colonels were charged with treason, the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office said in a Telegram post Tuesday. One of the colonels also was charged with “aiding in the preparation of a terrorist act.”