By Maia Davies | BBC News |
Ukraine said two agents working for Russia have been killed after a senior Ukrainian intelligence officer was shot dead on Thursday.
The head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), Vasyl Malyuk, said in a video statement that two agents working for Russia’s security service FSB had been tracked down and “liquidated” after they resisted arrest on Sunday morning.
It comes after Col Ivan Voronych was shot several times in a Kyiv car park in broad daylight, after being approached by an unidentified assailant who fled the scene.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s national police said the two agents killed were “citizens of a foreign country”, without giving any further details. Moscow had no immediate response.
CCTV footage of the incident on 10 July – verified by the news agency Reuters – showed a man leaving a building in Kyiv’s southern Holosiivskyi district shortly after 09:00 local time (06:00 GMT), while another man ran towards him.
The SBU said on Sunday the suspects had been tracking Col Voronych’s movements prior to the attack, and were sent the co-ordinates of a hiding place where they found a pistol with a silencer.
It said that after he was shot, they then tried to “lay low,” but were found following a joint investigation with national police.
The SBU mainly focuses on internal security and counter-intelligence, like the UK’s MI5. But it has played a prominent role in sabotage attacks and assassinations deep inside Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Sources within Ukraine’s security services told the BBC that the SBU was responsible for the killing of the high-ranking Russian Gen Igor Kirillov in December 2024.
In April, Gen Yaroslav Moskalik was killed in a car bomb attack in Moscow – which the Kremlin blamed on Kyiv.
Ukraine’s security services have never officially admitted responsibility for the deaths.
This week’s deaths come after Russian strikes on Ukraine have hit record levels.
On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had faced its largest ever Russian aerial attack. In June, Ukraine recorded the highest monthly civilian casualties in three years, according to the UN.
Fighting has also continued on the frontlines, with Russia’s military making slow gains in eastern Ukraine and retaking control of most of Russia’s Kursk region that Kyiv’s forces seized in a surprise offensive last summer.
Efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in the more than three-year-long war have faltered.
