Ukraine said two agents working for Russia have been killed after a senior Ukrainian intelligence officer was shot dead on Thursday.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It comes after Col Ivan Voronych was shot several times<\/a> in a Kyiv car park in broad daylight, after being approached by an unidentified assailant who fled the scene.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It said that after he was shot, they then tried to “lay low,” but were found following a joint investigation with national police.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sources within Ukraine’s security services told the BBC<\/a> that the SBU was responsible for the killing of the high-ranking Russian Gen Igor Kirillov in December 2024.<\/p>\n In April, Gen Yaroslav Moskalik was killed in a car bomb attack<\/a> in Moscow – which the Kremlin blamed on Kyiv. <\/p>\n Ukraine’s security services have never officially admitted responsibility for the deaths.<\/p>\n This week’s deaths come after Russian strikes on Ukraine have hit record levels.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had faced its largest ever Russian aerial attack<\/a>. In June, Ukraine recorded the highest monthly civilian casualties<\/a> in three years, according to the UN.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in the more than three-year-long war have faltered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ukraine said two agents working for Russia have been killed after a senior Ukrainian intelligence officer was shot…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":62446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-62445","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114846412519230751","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}