Russian President Vladimir Putin sent two “hit squads” into Ukraine just prior to the invasion, targeting President Volodymyr Zelensky in an effort to decapitate the Ukrainian government. According to the Ukrainian government, the threat has been neutralized thanks to intel from Russian security forces sympathetic to Ukraine.
The assassins were Chechen. One group was intercepted just outside of Kyiv and the other group is apparently still at large. The Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said on Ukrainian TV that sources inside the Russian intelligence service FSB gave Kyiv the information needed to track down the assassins.
“We won’t give up our president, our country,” Danilov added. “This is our land. Be gone.”
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Zelensky himself said he expected to be targeted at the beginning of hostilities last week — telling European leaders in a video message: “This might be the last time you see me alive.”
It was not immediately clear how many assassins were killed or captured on Tuesday.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya and a Putin ally, confirmed the presence of Chechen fighters in Ukraine last week and urged Ukrainians to overthrow their government.
The two Chechen paramilitary groups — “The Kadyrovites,” named after Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, and the Wagner Group, which has operated in Syria and other hotspots, carrying out assassinations and terrorist acts — show that Putin is throwing everything he has into the fight.
“I can say that we received information from representatives of the FSB, who today have no desire to take part in this bloody war,” said Danilov, who claimed that the Chechen special forces sent to kill Zelensky had been “eliminated.”
“The Kadyrovites’ elite group, which came here specifically to eliminate our president, was directly destroyed,” he said. Kadyrovites refers to a Chechen paramilitary group accused of a number of human-rights violations and abuses. They serve at the pleasure of Razman Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic and a close ally of Vladimir Putin.
If Danilov actually received the intel from FSB traitors, Putin is in a lot more trouble than anyone might think. The FSB is Putin’s “palace guard” and defections from that group — defections from officials senior enough to know about the attempts to assassinate Zelensky — spell trouble for the Russian president.
However, it’s more likely that the Ukrainian government received the intel indirectly from a third party, perhaps the U.S. Wherever they got it, they certainly made the most of it.
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