An alleged informant for Russia has been detained in connection to a plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said Monday.
The woman’s name has not been publicly released, but according to a statement from the SBU, she is from the southern Ukrainian region of Mykolaiv.
The SBU said the suspect had been “gathering intelligence” about Zelensky’s planned visit to Mykolaiv at the end of July, in order to plan a Russian airstrike to kill the president.
However, SBU agents prevented the attempted assassination after the agency obtained information about the “subversive activities of the suspect” and adopted additional security measures.
The woman was caught “red-handed” as she “was trying to pass intelligence to the invaders,” SBU said.
In monitoring the communications of the woman, the SBU established that she also had the task of identifying the location of electronic warfare systems and warehouses with ammunition of the armed forces.
She allegedly traveled around the territory of the district and filmed the locations of Ukrainian objects.
According to the investigation, the alleged informant was a resident of Ochakov in Mykolaiv region and a former salesperson in a military store.
This is not the first assassination attempt: Zelensky has faced several known attempts on his life since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of his country in February 2022. Russian special forces were tasked with eliminating the Ukrainian president at the start of the war.
In a profile published in April 2022, TIME magazine described how Russian troops had parachuted into Kyiv to kill or capture Zelensky and his family on February 24, the day after the war began.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said in March of last year that Zelensky had survived more than a dozen assassination attempts.
