Ukrainian snipers take part in shooting training near the front line in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on February 18, 2023, amid the Russo-Ukrainian war. Mustafa Ciftci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Former spy Valentin Nalivaychenko said even he was concerned that the attacks in Ukraine had gone too far.
He told The Economist: “Ukraine’s security services shouldn’t do things just because they can.”
Ukraine is silent, but throughout the war there have been assassinations in occupied territories and in Russia.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, dozens of Russian officials and conspirators have been murdered both in occupied Ukrainian territory and in Russia.
But now even a former Ukrainian spy is concerned that the country’s assassination squads are going too far.
Valentin Nalivaychenko, former head of Ukraine’s security service and current member of parliament, told The Economist that recent missions have been quite risky for Ukrainian intelligence, as in some cases they lacked a strategy or put agents and their sources at risk.
“Our security services should not do things just because they can,” Nalivaychenko said, adding that while some killings were justified, others had raised concerns.
His comments echoed the concerns of other Ukrainian officials, with an anonymous source within the SBU’s counterintelligence department telling The Economist that the targeting of mid-level propagandists or relatively small fry in Russia’s larger information and political systems was sometimes more targeted , to impress the president than to win a victory in the war.
“Clowns, prostitutes and pranksters are a constant in the Russian government,” the source told the medium. “Kill one of them and another will appear in their place.”
Ukraine’s spy network has reportedly increased its attacks, particularly against war propagandists far from the front lines. In an interview last May, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said his agents had “successfully targeted quite a number of people.”
“Thanks to media coverage, there were cases that everyone knew about,” Budanov told The Times.
One of the most recent suspected assassinations occurred in July, when a Russian submarine commander was shot while escaping in Krasnodar. He was previously suspected of being responsible for a high-precision Kalibr cruise missile strike in Vinnytsia in July 2022 that killed 28 Ukrainian civilians.
And in April, a Russian military blogger was killed in a cafe explosion in St. Petersburg. Russia arrested a woman over the attack and blamed Ukraine for the attack; The country has denied involvement in the attack.
Other attacks fell into a morally gray area. In October 2022, The New York Times reported that U.S. government officials blamed Ukraine for a car bombing that killed Darya Dugina – the daughter of Russian far-right nationalist and propagandist Alexander Dugin.
It is unclear whether Dugina or Dugin himself was the intended target.
Read the original article on Business Insider