Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Portal/File
In this January 2023 photo, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov and his wife Marianna attend a memorial ceremony for Ukraine’s interior minister, his deputy and officials killed in a helicopter crash near the Ukrainian capital during Russia’s attack on Ukraine in Kiev lost their lives.
WashingtonCNN –
The wife of Ukraine’s top military intelligence official has been hospitalized with apparent heavy metal poisoning, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.
Marianna Budanova is the wife of Kyrylo Budanov, whose GUR military intelligence agency was heavily involved in Ukraine’s efforts to expel Russia from its territory, and Western officials immediately suspected that Russian agents may have paid an employee to carry out the poisoning .
Test results show that employees of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency have also fallen ill, according to Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for the intelligence service, and Ukraine is investigating the situation.
American and Western intelligence officials have not independently verified the poisoning but believe the Ukrainian reports are accurate, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.
The seriousness of Budanova’s condition was not immediately apparent. According to the GUR representative, she had been in the hospital for a week and had been feeling unwell for some time before hospitalization. A defense intelligence source told CNN that Budanova tested positive for arsenic and mercury, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information has not been made public. CNN has reached out to Budanova for comment.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront” Tuesday night that “it is very likely that Russia is behind it” but that he is “not drawing any official conclusions.”
“It would be premature for me to draw any conclusions, but when fighting against such a vicious enemy as Russia, you have to be prepared for anything, and Russia has often proven itself to be a country that uses poison as a means of killing its Opponents and his enemies,” Kuleba told Burnett.
“And definitely our intelligence chief is the enemy of Russia, just like all of us. Everyone who fights against Russia,” he continued. “So it’s very likely that Russia is behind it, but I don’t draw any official conclusions, so I’ll leave the decision to the experts.”
Dr. Edward Boyer, the head of the toxicology department at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said that without a more detailed understanding of the test results and the patient’s medical history – including his symptoms and possible exposure to certain foods – it is impossible to assess the likelihood that any appearance of the victims were deliberately poisoned.
“What will really matter are the actual symptoms. There are different toxicities associated with different metals,” Boyer said. “It is important to obtain not only a history of environmental exposure, but also a history of dietary intake, coupled with actual symptoms.”
It is known that Russia – and previously the Soviet Union – carried out extraterritorial poisonings against its enemies. In England in 2018, Russian agents used a nerve agent to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for British intelligence services. In the 1950s, the KGB used thallium – a heavy metal used in rat poison and insecticides – to poison one of its own agents who had defected to the United States.
During the March 2022 Ukraine-Russia talks in Turkey, a Russian billionaire and two Ukrainian negotiators suffered minor skin abrasions and sore eyes, a source close to the Ukrainian negotiating team told CNN at the time. While initial reports suggested they were suffering from poisoning, later reports suggested they became ill due to an environmental factor rather than poisoning.
This story has been updated with additional details.