5/9/2024
reading time 2 minutes
Ukrainian security services announced on Tuesday that they had foiled a plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Two colonels of the State Guard of Ukraine, which counts among its duties the protection of top Ukrainian officials, have been identified as members of a group that allegedly cooperated with the Russian security agency FSB in the assassination of President Zelensky, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Vasyl Malyuk and the head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanova.
This is one of the most serious attempts to assassinate President Zelensky since February 2022, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. According to Kyiv, this is also the first time that high-ranking officials have been involved in such a plot. It is unprecedented that “a high-ranking official of the Ministry of State Security has become a mole,” SBU spokesman Artem Dehtiarenko told Politico.
The news of the alleged plot follows months of internal turmoil in Kyiv, including frequent sackings and arrests of top and senior officials on corruption and espionage charges, as well as Zelensky’s decision to fire the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and the country’s second-most popular public figure Valerij Zálužný, reports Mark Episkopos.
These events, viewed against the backdrop of Ukraine’s declining battlefield prospects, point to certain internal vulnerabilities in Ukraine that should worry Western policymakers.
The details of this particular assassination attempt are still unclear, and the full extent of Russian involvement has yet to be investigated. However, if – as Ukraine’s security agency claims – Russian agents were able to enlist the help of at least two high-ranking Ukrainian officials to organize a large-scale plot to kill three top Ukrainian civil servants, including the president, this suggests a broader phenomenon of widespread penetration of Russian intelligence services into the Ukrainian bureaucracy and army that will be difficult to fully eradicate, let alone root out.
Indeed, this problem is likely to become even more acute as the growing threat of a breakdown of the front lines creates new incentives for Ukrainian officials at all levels to consider cooperation with Russia. The May assassination could thus be an early warning signal of an internal dysfunction that, if left unchecked, may ultimately threaten Ukraine’s political stability.
These developments do not indicate that the Ukrainian state is victorious or confident of its imminent victory, but rather a symptom of a beleaguered warlord government, wracked by internal weaknesses that Russia is increasingly exploiting.
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