Ukraine's security agency said Sunday it tracked down and killed Russian agents suspected of shooting one of its senior officers to death in the Ukrainian capital.
The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, said in a statement that the suspected Russian agents were killed in the Kyiv region after they offered resistance to arrest. A video released by the agency showed two bodies lying on the ground.
"This morning a special operation was conducted, during which the members of the Russian FSB's agent cell started to resist, and therefore they were liquidated," the statement on the Telegram messaging app said.
The agency said earlier that a man and a woman were suspected to be involved in Thursday's assassination of Ivan Voronych, an SBU colonel, in a bold daylight attack that was caught on surveillance cameras.
Russian authorities made no immediate public comment on Sunday's operation, which mirrored past assassinations of senior Russian military officials by Ukraine during the three-year-old war - a source of embarrassment for Moscow's vast intelligence agencies.
Media reports claimed that Voronych was involved in covert operations in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine and reportedly helped organize Ukraine's surprise incursion into Russia's Kursk region last year.
According to the SBU, the alleged assassins were told by their handler to surveil their target and track his movements. They were eventually given the coordinates of a hiding place where they found a pistol with a suppressor, the SBU said.
It said they had tried to "lay low" after Thursday's killing, but were tracked down by the SBU and police.
The agency's remit covers security and counterintelligence, but since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine it has also played a prominent role in special operations against Moscow, including assassinations and sabotage attacks.
After a series of massive attacks across Ukraine involving hundreds of exploding drones, Russia launched 60 drones overnight, Ukraine's air force said. It said 20 of them were shot down and 20 others were jammed.
The Ukrainian authorities reported that four civilians were killed and 13 others injured in Russian attacks on the Donetsk and Kherson regions since Saturday
(AP and Reuters)
