Ukrainian intelligence agents killed members of a Russian secret service cell wanted on suspicion of having shot dead a colonel last week, the SBU said.
The SBU intelligence agency said in a statement that the operation had sought the arrest of the agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), who it believes were behind the killing of Colonel Ivan Voronych – also a member of the SBU security service – in Kyiv on Thursday.
“This morning a special operation was conducted, during which the members of the Russian FSB’s agent cell started to resist, and therefore they were liquidated,” a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday said.
Russian authorities made no immediate public comment on Sunday’s operation, which mirrored past assassinations of senior Russian military officials by Ukraine during the three-year-old war – a source of embarrassment for Moscow’s vast intelligence agencies.
The SBU said two people – a man and a woman – were suspected of having killed Voronych in a bold daylight attack that was caught on surveillance cameras. It did not say how many suspected FSB agents had been killed on Sunday, but the SBU posted a video in which two bodies were visible.
Media reports claimed that Voronych was involved in covert operations in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine and reportedly helped organise Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last year.
According to the SBU, the alleged assassins were told by their handler to surveil their target and track his movements. They were eventually given the coordinates of a hiding place where they found a pistol with a suppressor, the SBU said.
It said they had tried to “lay low” after Thursday’s killing but were tracked down by the SBU and police.
The agency’s remit covers security and counterintelligence, but since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine it has also played a prominent role in special operations against Moscow, including assassinations and sabotage attacks.
After a series of huge attacks across Ukraine involving hundreds of exploding drones, Russia launched 60 drones overnight into Sunday, Ukraine’s air force said. It said 20 of them were shot down and 20 others were jammed.
On Sunday, Ukrainian authorities reported that four civilians were killed and 13 others injured in Russian attacks on the Donetsk and Kherson regions since Saturday.
With Reuters, Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press
