Assassinated Ukrainian officer ran secret ‘gray units' – NYT (VIDEO)
Local news reported that a man was gunned down in a Kiev parking lot on Thursday. Security footage circulating on social media showed someone approaching the victim from behind and shooting him several times at close range.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), Kiev's successor to the Soviet-era KGB, later confirmed to the media that the deceased was one of their intelligence officers, Colonel Ivan Voronich.
This morning in Kyiv's Holosiivskyi district, SBU Colonel Ivan Voronych accused of several sabotage attacks in Russia was shot dead pic.twitter.com/eZv0pOgwr5
The officer had formerly commanded the SBU's Fifth Directorate special operations unit, which 'received technical support from the CIA,' the NYT wrote on Friday, citing one of the colonel's former colleagues.
The unit was responsible for the 2016 assassination of Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom-de-guerre 'Motorola', a senior military officer in the then breakaway Ukrainian region of Donetsk.
Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Voronich 'was part of an elite unit responsible for operating in the gray zone between the enemy lines,' NYT cited its sources as saying.
His unit allegedly played a crucial role in the Ukrainian incursion into Russia's Kursk Region last year.
Kiev invaded Kursk last August, aiming to take territory as a bargaining chip for future ceasefire negotiations and to divert Russian forces from key parts of the front line. Ukraine's commander-in-chief, Aleksandr Syrsky, later admitted that the gambit failed to achieve this.
Moscow announced that Kursk Region was fully liberated in April. Russian authorities have since said they discovered evidence of widespread atrocities committed against the local civilian population.
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kiev's forces lost around 76,000 soldiers, dead and wounded, in the incursion. As a result, Moscow has pushed 'to establish a security zone along large sections of the border,' forcing Ukraine to divert 'troops they can't spare' along the 2,000km front line, Putin said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month. Ukrainian units are now 'stretched thin' and 'only 47% manned,' he stated.
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