They’ve been trying to take Zelensky out and failing.
President Zelensky has survived at least three assassination attempts in the past week, The Times has learnt.
Two different outfits have been sent to kill the Ukrainian president — mercenaries of the Kremlin-backed Wagner group and Chechen special forces. Both have been thwarted by anti-war elements within Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
Wagner mercenaries in Kyiv have sustained losses during their attempts and are said to have been alarmed by how accurately the Ukrainians had anticipated their moves. A source close to the group said it was “eerie” how well briefed Zelensky’s security team appeared to be.
Some Chechens tried last Saturday and were “eliminated” by Ukrainian security.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, told Ukrainian TV channels that Russian spies had tipped them off about the planned assassination.Ukrainian officials claim the information that led to the deaths of the Chechens came from disgruntled agents in the FSB who oppose the invasion.
Awesome. I’ve been wondering about that. All the reports are that Putin is isolated and paranoid, so it seems highly likely that there are plenty of “disgruntled” people all over the place, including in the FSB.
However, there are still a lot of agents there, and they could still succeed.
Comments
8 responses to “Anti-war elements”
The Wagner group is riddled with neo-nazis, for example its founder, Dmitri Utkin.
https://en.respublica.lt/signs-of-neo-nazi-ideology-amongst-russian-mercenaries
Makes sense.
Meanwhile Lindsey Graham is provoking outcry with his suggestion that Putin should be assassinated.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/04/lindsey-graham-suggests-putin-assassination-russia-ukraine
Graham’s achieved the impossible: he’s made Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene sound like the voice of reason.
@3 Heather Cox Richardson wrote about that this morning–classic ‘stupid or evil?’
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-3-2022?s=r
Thank you, that’s a great article.
I don’t necessarily disagree with Graham here… Dead Putin would be an improvement. Assassination in IRL isn’t like following a videogame quest marker and it’s not something you just announce. So as a suggestion… Yeah, I dunno.
Kind of off topic and not really relevant to the far more important story of the conflict itself, but on a personal note I do wish the neo-Nazis would leave Wagner out of their bullshit. His music isn’t to everyone’s taste, and as a person he was absolutely-certainly an arrogant asshole in a number of ways, including making incendiary and unforgivable antisemitic remarks. But he was dead and buried half a century before the Nazis arose, and I think it’s pretty clear to anyone who’s watched his operas and digested their themes that he would have despised the Nazis and their totalitarian barbarism. (His descendants, rich and famous off of his legacy, unfortunately only tarnished his already… complicated… legacy by aligning with the Nazis, like so many German elites did.)
I’m not quite for “rehabilitating” Wagner’s reputation (I think it’s “complicated” and it rightly should remain so) so much as I’m for at least uncoupling it from outright Nazism. His music, if you ask me and countless others, is so profound it’s life-changing, and his operas’ characters have a psychological depth to rival Shakespeare’s — which is all the more challenging in the medium of music: it’s almost supernatural, the range of emotions we can conjure with little more than tensioned strings of sheep intestines vibrated with bows of horse hair, and horns fashioned out of brass with little wooden reeds pressed against the lips…