When he pulled an AK-12 assault rifle from a secret weapons cache at the edge of Kyiv and readied himself to shoot a traitor, the Ukrainian ex-soldier believed he was about to kill for his country.
The man he had been ordered to assassinate by his intelligence handlers was an agent in the employ of the Russian FSB who was sending target information to the Russians ahead of missile and drone strikes on the Ukrainian capital.
Or so the veteran thought.
For weeks the former soldier from Kamianske had kept his target under close surveillance. Then came the order to liquidate the traitor. Yet no sooner had he collected the assault rifle and moved to complete his mission, the veteran was grabbed and arrested by an SBU snatch squad from Ukrainian intelligence — and an awful truth was revealed.
Officers arresting the unnamed assassin as he prepared to kill Captain Serhii Filimonov, below
Captain Serhii Filimonov is the commander of the prestigious 108th Separate Assault Battalion – Da Vinci Wolves
X.COM
Rather than serving his country, the ex-soldier had instead been duped and unknowingly recruited by the Russians. The “SBU handlers” for whom he believed he was working were in fact Russian FSB operatives; and, far from being a traitor, the man that he had been set up to kill was instead a renowned Ukrainian military officer, Captain Serhii Filimonov, the commander of the prestigious 108th Separate Assault Battalion “Da Vinci Wolves”.
More of a gullible patsy rather than a Carlos the Jackal, the deceived would-be assassin — whose name has yet to be released by Ukrainian intelligence operatives — is not alone in being duped by Russian operatives into plotting to kill his own countrymen.
At least four out of the six most recent high-profile assassination operations in Ukraine have involved Ukrainian nationals either tricked or groomed by Russian FSB handlers into targeting other Ukrainians.
The killing of Andriy Parubiy, a former Speaker in Ukraine’s parliament, was a “horrific murder”, President Zelensky said
MYKHAILO MARKIV/AFP
Parubiy was assassinated last month. His coffin was carried by a military honour guard
MYKOLA TYS/GLOBAL IMAGES UKRAINE/GETTY
Even the most recent killing in the brutal tit-for-tat assassination campaign between the SBU and FSB illustrates the reach of Russian manipulation. The former speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, was shot dead in Lviv on August 30 in a killing now believed to have been carried out by the father of a missing Ukrainian soldier, who had allegedly been manipulated by the Russians into shooting Parubiy in exchange for his son’s body.
Parubiy’s killer was named as Mykhailo Stelnikov, a 52-year-old resident of the city. Stelnikov’s son, a Ukrainian soldier, went missing in action near Bakhmut in 2023. Though Stelnikov has said he acted on his own initiative, investigators say he was groomed by Russian handlers.
Mykhailo Stelnikov, the man suspected of the assassination of Andriy Parubiy, appeared in court this week
REUTERS
“Russia tries to manipulate psychologically weak people to work for them as killers,” said Captain Filimonov, who was interviewed by The Times in a bunker west of Pokrovsk a day before Parubiy’s assassination. “Ukrainians are angriest over the issue of missile and drone attacks on residential targets and civilian infrastructure. That anger is used by the Russians as a prime recruitment method. In my case, they told someone suggestible that I was actually a Russian agent, correcting Russian fire on Kyiv. That was the start of it.”
The SBU released word of the attempt on Captain Filimonov’s life on July 29, after his intended killer had been arrested while armed and in the street.
The recent spate of assassinations in Ukraine has included that of Iryna Farion, the ultranationalist former MP who was shot dead in Lviv in July 2024. Her Ukrainian assassin, Vyacheslav Zincenko, 18, was a member of online hate groups that included a Russian neo-Nazi organisation.
Iryna Farion was an ultranationalist former MP — she was shot dead in Lviv in July 2024
ROMAN BALUK/REUTERS
In March, Demyan Hanul, a Ukrainian activist and onetime member of the nationalist Right Sector political coalition, was shot dead in Odesa. He was killed by 46-year-old Serhii Shalaiev, a Ukrainian lieutenant who was wanted for desertion.
Two months later, Liudmila Chumerska, a 45-year-old woman from Odesa, shot and wounded Ukrainian activist Serhii Sternenko in Kyiv, having been persuaded by a man she had met and fallen in love with online that Sternenko was a Russian agent co-ordinating strikes on Kyiv. Chumerska, who requires dialysis, later told investigators that she had also been promised help with a kidney transplant if she killed Sternenko.
Serhii Sternenko, a Ukrainian activist, lawyer and YouTuber, survived a second assassination attempt this year
JACK HILL FOR THE TIMES
The only exception to the pattern was the shooting of the SBU’s Colonel Ivan Voronych in Kyiv on July 10. Though working with a different SBU department at the time of his death, Voronych had once served with the secret service’s 5th Counterintelligence Directorate, responsible for eliminating high-level Russian proxy commanders and intelligence agents. He was gunned down by a professional killer. Three days after this death, two Azerbaijani citizens — Zaqarni Gulelizade and Narmin Gilyeva — believed to be responsible for carrying out the hit on FSB orders, were in turn both shot and killed in an SBU raid on their hideout in Kyiv.
Ivan Voronych was shot dead by a masked assassin in Kyiv on July 10
EAST2WEST
The assassination trend using Ukrainians against their own is relatively novel.
“Agent operations under a foreign flag are a fairly new tactic for the Russian special services,” Ukraine’s SBU noted in a statement after the arrest of Captain Filimonov’s would-be assassin. “During recruitment interviews, FSB representatives pose as Security Service employees and assign tasks to agents supposedly in the interests of Ukraine.”
Yet if the base emotion motivating the assassin was simple, the entrapment of Captain Filimonov’s would-be killer was sophisticated. First the ex-soldier was called by a woman — in reality an FSB operative — purporting to work for the SBU. She accused him of buying medical supplies from an online store that was sending funds to the Russian army. The veteran was also told that a criminal case had been opened against him, and was sent a fake summons for questioning by the SBU.
• While Putin talks peace, his bombs still pound Ukraine
The psychological pressure upon the man then mounted through a series of fraudulent communications, in which he was informed that the case against him would be closed in return for his co-operation with the SBU.
Instructed to come to Kyiv, he was next ordered to rent an apartment in the same block as Filimonov and to start surveillance of the officer’s movements. The duped ex-soldier was persuaded by the FSB that Filimonov, rather than being the commander of an elite Ukrainian infantry unit, was instead an agent of Russia, who was co-ordinating missile and drone strikes on Kyiv.
Carried away with the emotion of the moment, the veteran is known to have said that he would be happy to shoot Filimonov for his country, even at risk of his own life. “They even tried to pay him,” Filimonov reflected dryly, “but he said he would do it for free for his country.”
However, the real SBU had compromised the FSB operation, warning Filimonov that there was a plan to kill him. Despite moving his family out of their apartment in Kyiv amid fears that their car might become booby-trapped, the officer was encouraged by the SBU to maintain his own normal pattern of life while on leave, so as not to arouse suspicion in the man planning to kill him. This allowed the SBU counterespionage team time to gather more intelligence on the scope of the Russian operation.
“It was a very strange time,” Filimonov recalled, “going into my apartment as though nothing was different, knowing that a man planning to kill me was close at hand in the same building. I had faith in the SBU’s plan, but it was an uneasy feeling.” Only after the deceived assassin had collected the AK-12 from the weapons cache and moved to shoot Filimonov was he arrested. He remains in custody.
In Filimonov’s command bunker west of Pokrovsk last week, in an area which is currently the focus of intense battle as Russia seeks to advance deeper into Ukraine, thoughts of the failed plot to kill him in Kyiv seemed far away.
Live drone feeds on wall-mounted screens showed a Ukrainian defensive position on the front coming under heavy fire by Russian artillery. A drone lingered over the body of a soldier lying in the undergrowth, examining him for signs of life. There were none. The Ukrainian officers stared at the screens in silence.
“It is not the first Russian plan I have learnt of to have me assassinated,” Filimonov said afterwards. “Generally I feel the SBU have my back — I am confident in them. But in this war, any of us could be killed: either by a Russian missile right here, fighting on the front, or in the street in Kyiv.”