After months of flat denials, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence has admitted to his country's involvement in the assassination of several high-profile Kremlin propagandists since February of 2022 and claimed that Kiev intends to establish a demilitarized border zone up to 95 kilometers inside of Russia.
“The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service has admitted that his agents have assassinated Kremlin propagandists in the 15 months since Russia invaded.
He also said that Kiev aimed to establish a demilitarised border zone up to 60 miles inside Russia to deter any future attacks; comments that will stoke fears of escalation in the war.
‘We’ve already successfully targeted quite a few people. There have been well-publicized cases everyone knows about, thanks to the media coverage’, Major-General Kyrylo Budanov, 37, said when asked whether Ukrainian security services had killed Russian propagandists.
Several influential pro-war figures have been killed or wounded by explosives planted on Russian soil since February last year. In the latest such incident, on May 6th, Zachar Prilepin, 47, a celebrated writer who had boasted of killing Ukrainians ‘in large numbers’, suffered two broken legs in a car bombing that also killed his bodyguard. The attack took place near Nizhny Novgorod, 265 miles east of Moscow.
Russian investigators said they were questioning a suspect named Alexander Permyakov, whom they accused of working with Ukrainian intelligence.
Vladlen Tatarsky, 40, a military blogger and an acolyte of the Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed by explosives hidden in a bust of himself given to him in a St Petersburg café during a pro-war event on April 2nd.
The Russian internal affairs ministry said an arrest warrant had been issued for Yuriy Denisov, a Ukrainian citizen they claim surveilled Tatarsky for two months from an apartment near his home. It alleged he had traveled from Latvia under instruction from the ‘Ukrainian special services’.
In August last year Darya Dugina, 29, a pro-war pundit for the state-controlled RT television channel, was killed by a car bomb thought to have targeted her father, Alexander Dugin, the ultranationalist ideologue, said to have influence over President Putin.
Drone strikes on the Kremlin on May 3rd, apparently intended to kill Putin, had taken place ‘because of Russian aggression’, Budanov claimed.
Speaking on Different People, a Ukrainian YouTube channel, Budanov said that recent acts of sabotage inside Russian territory, including a cargo train derailment and attacks on oil and gas infrastructure close to the Ukrainian border, had been carried out ‘almost 100 percent by citizens of the Russian Federation’.
In a separate interview with Island, another YouTube channel, Budanov said he had ‘a minority of Russians’ cooperating with his Ukrainian military intelligence agency, the GUR. They were motivated by ‘patriotic reasons’ and ‘ready to change Russia’, he said.
Budanov emphasized that although Putin was a legitimate target, Ukraine was not making attempts to kill him.
His agents would continue to target those Russians who committed war crimes against Ukraine, he said. ‘These cases have happened and will continue. Such people will receive a well-deserved punishment, and the appropriate punishment can only be liquidation and I will implement it’.
Budanov blamed Russian propagandists for the Kremlin’s increasingly brutal tactics in Ukraine, trapping Putin in a vicious cycle from which he could not escape with his life. ‘[The Kremlin] have invested so much in this propaganda machine that it began to influence them in the end’.
He said that Moscow’s business elite was opposed to the war and was looking for ways to end it. Russian oligarchs have lost billions of dollars because of Western sanctions and economic pressure, but criticism of the invasion has been rare and muted.
Dissidents who have spoken out against it have been imprisoned or poisoned. Natalia Arno, the founder of the Free Russia Foundation, who fled to the U.S. in 2014, said that she too was the victim of foul play during a recent visit to Europe: her hotel room was broken into and sprayed with what smelt like ‘cheap perfume’, but may have been a nerve agent that left her in ‘acute pain’.
If the Russians themselves overthrew Putin, Ukraine would still need to establish a demilitarized zone 60 miles inside Russian territory to prevent future conflict, Budanov argued. ‘This should be our goal. If they are not going to attack and don’t decide they want revenge in a couple of years, this shouldn’t be an issue’”. -Maxim Tucker, Sunday Times
At some point, it will dawn on Americans that they’ve made a colossal mistake in bankrolling a terroristic regime that is willing to assassinate its political critics to the tune of billions of dollars under the guise of combating the Kremlin in its supposedly despotic crackdown on dissent.