Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said on Sunday that its intelligence officers had killed a group of suspected FSB agents in Kyiv Oblast on suspicion of being involved in the shooting of SBU Colonel Ivan Voronych last week.
The SBU said in a statement that the special operation was aimed at arresting the FSB agents, who were accused of murdering Colonel Voronych in Kyiv on July 11, according to Reuters.
“This morning a special operation was carried out, during which the FSB intelligence team members tried to resist and were killed,” the statement said, published on the SBU’s official Telegram account.
Russian authorities have not yet made a public response to the operation. The incident is similar to past targeted killings of senior Russian military officials in the three-year war, which have often embarrassed Moscow’s vast intelligence system.
The SBU said there were two people suspected of killing Voronych, a man and a woman. The number of FSB agents killed that day has not yet been disclosed.
According to the SBU, the personnel carrying out the assassination mission had previously monitored the target for a long time under the instructions of the “superior” and mastered its movement trajectory. The superior then provided them with the coordinates of a hiding place, where the two took a pistol with a silencer.
The SBU said that the two tried to “lurk and hide” after the assassination, but were eventually tracked and locked by the SBU and the police.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the SBU has assumed a core role in special operations against Russia, including assassinations and sabotage operations, in addition to its original national security and counterintelligence duties.
