Assassination attempts on Volodymyr Zelenskyy
attempts at killing Volodymyr Zelenskyy
According to Ukrainian government officials and news sources, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has survived dozens of assassination and kidnapping attempts by Russian or pro-Russian agents during the Russo-Ukrainian war, including at least three that were foiled by Ukrainian security services.
Background
According to Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, Russia planned to achieve a quick victory during the invasion by sending groups into the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, to eliminate Ukraine's leadership. He stated that "Russia's key intention [was] to remove the country's top leadership, create maximum panic, and try to establish its own puppet government".
Attempts
2022
According to the Ukrainian government, in early February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin instructed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to eliminate Ukrainian leaders. In early March, Ukraine intelligence said that Chechen commandos sent to assassinate Zelenskyy had been "eliminated", with help from FSB agents sympathetic to Ukraine.
In February 2022, Redut PMC was ordered on a covert mission in the Kyiv region to infiltrate and eliminate the political leadership and the Ukrainian Secret Service, by storming those institutions. More than one thousand fighters entered the Kyiv region for this purpose, however the mission failed due to the Ukrainian government having prior intel regarding the plan, resulting in Redut losing up to 90% of their fighting force.
In addition, on Saturday, 26 February 2022, an assassination attempt by a group of Chechen mercenaries was prevented on the outskirts of Kyiv with the would-be assassins killed.
More than 400 Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group were reported to have been in Kyiv by late February 2022, with orders to assassinate Zelenskyy and destabilise the government enough for Russia to take control.
Zelenskyy subsequently reported that, during one attempt on his life in 2022, "people were killed inside the presidential office", but did not further describe the attack or whether those killed were Ukrainian security forces and/or would-be assassins.
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This entry incorporates text from “Assassination attempts on Volodymyr Zelenskyy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.