Ukraine's SBU says suspected Russian FSB assassins killed in Kyiv after Ukrainian agent shot dead last week

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6 days ago

Ukrainian intelligence agents have killed members of a Russian secret service cell wanted on suspicion of having shot dead a colonel in Ukraine's SBU security service last week, the SBU said.
The intelligence agency said in a statement that the operation had sought the arrest of the agents of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), which it believes were behind the killing of SBU Colonel Ivan Voronych in Kyiv on Thursday.
The statement on Sunday, local time, said the Russian agents resisted arrest and they were "liquidated".
"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," the statement on Telegram 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.
The SBU said two people — a man and a woman — were suspected of having killed Colonel Voronych.
It did not say how many suspected FSB agents had been killed on Sunday.
The SBU reported that its chief, Vasyl Maliuk, led the operation.
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 senior Ukrainian security officer was gunned down in a residential parking lot in Kyiv on Thursday before his assailant fled on foot in broad daylight, according to authorities.
Kyiv's police force said it was working to identify the shooter and that "measures are being taken to detain him".
Neither the SBU nor the police mentioned possible motives for the killing in Kyiv.
"The Security Service and the National Police are taking a comprehensive set of measures to clarify all the circumstances of the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice," the SBU said in a statement.
The SBU, a sprawling domestic spy agency that has thousands of staff, has undertaken assassinations and sabotage attacks against Russia.
The agency's remit covers security and counterintelligence, but since Russia's 2022 invasion, it has also played a prominent role in special operations against Moscow.
Those include an extraordinary drone operation codenamed Spider's Web that targeted Russian strategic aircraft at bases hundreds of miles from Ukraine, and the assassination of a top Russian general in Moscow using a bomb hidden in a scooter.
Reuters