Ukraine’s security agency tracked down and killed Russian agents on Sunday who were suspected of shooting dead one of its senior officers in the Ukrainian capital.
The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, said the suspected Russian agents were killed in the Kyiv region after they offered resistance to arrest. A video released by the agency showed two bodies lying on the ground.
The agency said earlier that a man and a woman were suspected to be involved in the assassination of Ivan Voronych, an SBU colonel, in a bold daylight attack on Thursday.
Surveillance footage published on social media showed the agent was executed in a car park by a shooter clad in dark clothing who fled the scene.
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 people who carried out the attack were instructed by their handler to surveil their target and track his movements. They were later given the coordinates of a hiding place in which they found a handgun and a silencer, the agency said.
The SBU said the assassins had tried to “lay low” after Thursday’s killing, but were tracked down by the agency and police.
“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 the Telegram messaging app 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 operation comes after one of the biggest weeks of aerial attacks on Ukraine, according to Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Ukrainian president said that over the past week Russia launched more than 1,800 drones, 1,200 guided bombs and 83 missiles at the country.
“The Russians are intensifying terror against cities and communities to increasingly intimidate our people,” he said on X.
Meanwhile, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has reaffirmed his country’s support for Russia.
During high-level meetings with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, Kim said North Korea was ready to “unconditionally support” Moscow’s actions to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.
Russian media reported Lavrov described the two countries’ ties as “an invincible fighting brotherhood” in his meeting with Kim and thanked him for the troops deployed to Russia.
Relations between Russia and North Korea have deepened dramatically during the last two years of the war in Ukraine, which started in February 2022, with Pyongyang deploying more than 10,000 troops and arms to Russia to back Moscow’s military campaign.
With additional reporting from wires agencies
