Ukraine Cites Mossad as Assassinations Multiply

Kyiv’s patiently constructed intelligence services and their assassins have more targets in their sights.

It’s never difficult to provoke Russia’s state propagandists into furious outbursts, since that’s their trademark characteristic. Even so, the Moscow TV studio denizens seemed more than usually enraged by a statement from Col. Roman Kostenko, a Ukrainian MP and former special forces commander.

Late in April, he said the Mossad campaigns to track down and assassinate senior Nazis would provide a model for Ukrainian attacks over the next 10-30 years, as agents worked to hunt down Russians responsible for atrocities during the all-out war.

Any peace agreement would be “only the beginning” for Ukrainian intelligence, he said. “These people will be punished wherever they are. They will be afraid not only to leave the territory of the Russian Federation, but to leave the house.”

The Ukrainians are already keeping that promise through a series of high-profile killings of senior officers inside Russia.

After a car bomb in late April killed Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, who often briefed the Russian president on the war in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ukraine “continues its involvement in terrorist activities inside our country.” It was a dry understatement of the humiliating fact that Ukraine has for years been successfully carried out complex intelligence operations inside Russia, some of them targeting senior Russian officers linked to the Kremlin’s war of aggression.

In late December, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov was killed in a blast from a scooter in Moscow, a day after he had been charged by Ukraine’s security services (SBU) with the use of banned chemical weapons. Yuri Kotenok, a Russian war reporter, glumly stated that Ukrainian intelligence “feel they have total impunity in Russia.”

Vasyl Malyuk, who heads the SBU, was open about the job his organization has to do. “The position of the security service is clear and unambiguous: every crime of the aggressor must be punished,” he said.

Kyiv’s successes have deep roots. It is in a far stronger position to operate inside Russia than most foreign intelligence agencies. Many Ukrainians not only speak Russian fluently, it is their mother tongue. Many have relatives and friends there, and know the country intimately. Russian culture and behavior is well understood.

These advantages have been ruthlessly exploited to strike at high-value targets and individuals, not only very senior officers but also naval commanders whose vessels fired missiles at civilian communities, and units associated with such attacks. Significant resources are devoted to identifying war criminals like the regimental commander accused of murdering 13 civilians during the Bucha massacre.

The intelligence gathering, hunting, and killing are the culmination of a wider pattern that dates back to Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Following the Euromaidan revolution, and former President Viktor Yanokoych’s flight to Russia, Ukraine‘s intelligence services were in disarray. Moscow had enjoyed a warm relationship with Kyiv under his presidency, and the old guard destroyed the offices of the main agency, the SBU, with many documents lost or taken to Russia. Ukraine was forced to rebuild from scratch, often recruiting young men from western Ukraine, who had never lived under Soviet rule.

Both the SBU and the Defense Intelligence Directorate (HUR), which is mainly focused on intelligence efforts abroad, needed support. The CIA was cautious about working closely with the SBU, due to its Soviet legacy, history of corruption, and entanglement in economic crimes, so, while the SBU got some help, HUR was the bigger beneficiary of Western intelligence support.

In 2015, then HUR chief, Gen. Valerii Kondratyuk, took significant risks to present the CIA with information on the Russians. The material was reportedly high grade and better than the US had received in a long time. A former US intelligence officer told ABC News that the Ukrainians’ “access was so significant. Here was the best friend of the Russians for many, many years. They knew things we just, frankly, had no idea of.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks, the US had shifted its focus away from Moscow. That made the information provided by Kondratyuk even more valuable.

As a result, the CIA developed a deeper partnership with HUR, according to a US diplomat stationed in Kyiv at the time. “HUR was our little baby,” another US official said. “We gave them all new equipment and training.”

The Kremlin is well aware of the capabilities of Ukrainian intelligence and the US links, according to Mark Galeotti, a fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and a Russia expert.

“The Russian security agencies treat it with considerable professional respect, even if equal dislike,” he said. “The Kremlin regards Ukraine as a US proxy and the SBU and HUR in particular as instruments of the CIA and Britain’s MI6.”

A sabotage mission in August 2016 led by HUR’s Unit 2245 inside occupied Crimea resulted in a firefight with Russian security services in the in town of Dzhankoy, reportedly killing two FSB officers. The Obama administration considered suspending CIA cooperation due to fears of escalation with Moscow, and Kondratyuk was fired as a result. Joe Biden who was Vice President at that time, warned Ukraine’s leadership: “it cannot come close to happening again.

Russia responded by targeting Ukrainian operatives. Maksym Shapoval, a key figure in the 2016 Crimea raid, was assassinated in 2017. Two years later, a Russian agent attempted to kill Kyrylo Budanov, then a rising HUR officer and now the agency’s head, using a car bomb — an attempt that failed when the device detonated prematurely.

In 2015 and 2016, HUR was tasked with eliminating key Russian-backed militant leaders in occupied Donbas, The Economist reported. Targets included Mikhail Tolstykh (“Givi”), Arsen Pavlov (“Motorola”), and Alexander Zakharchenko, each implicated in war crimes or atrocities. The methods of killing included bombings and targeted rocket strikes. After the full-scale invasion in 2022, the attacks behind enemy lines became more daring.

The assassinations, many using car bombs or targeted shootings, reflect Kyiv’s strategy of retaliation and psychological pressure, which has not always been welcomed in Western capitals, and that comes with clear risks of retaliation and mistaken identity.

For example, the August 2022 assassination of Daria Dugina, the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a Kremlin ideologue and advocate for the genocide of Ukrainians, angered US officials, The New York Times reported.

But fears of Kremlin red lines and threats of escalation if there were attacks on Russian soil, a driving force in the West’s caution, have proven baseless, said Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker from the Holos party. “These assassinations help demonstrate that,” she said.

The killings “show Ukraine can reach high-level targets anywhere inside Russia and that capability has the potential to expose the internal fractures in Putin’s regime,” she said. “These assassinations aren’t just tactical, they could reveal deeper instability in the Russian political system and challenge the perception of Putin’s unshakable authority.”

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By David Kirichenko. David Kirichenko is a freelance journalist and an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. Article first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.