ReutersA senior Ukrainian intelligence officer has been gunned down in broad daylight in Kyiv, officials have said.
The agent of the domestic Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was shot several times in a car park after being approached by an unidentified assailant who then fled the scene, footage circulated on social media shows.
The spy agency did not identify the victim, though Ukrainian media outlets have named him as Colonel Ivan Voronych.
The SBU is primarily concerned with internal security and counter-intelligence, akin to the UK’s MI5. But since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, it has also played a prominent role in assassinations and sabotage attacks deep inside Russia.
Sources within Ukraine’s security services have previously told the media – including the BBC – that they were behind the killing of the high-ranking Russian Gen Igor Kirillov in December 2024.
Earlier this year, Gen Yaroslav Moskalik was killed in a car bomb attack in Moscow – an incident the Kremlin blamed on Kyiv. Ukraine’s security services have never officially admitted responsibility for the deaths.
Neither the SBU nor the Kyiv Police gave a possible motive for the shooting.
The Ukrainian capital’s police force said in a statement that officers arrived at the scene to find a man’s body with a gunshot wound.
It said officers were working to identify the assailant and that “measures are being taken to detain him”.
The SBU said it was taking “a comprehensive set of measures to clarify all the circumstances of the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice”.
CCTV footage – which has been verified by the news agency Reuters – shows a man in jeans and a dark t-shirt exiting a building in the southern Holosiivskyi district shortly after 09:00 local time (06:00 GMT) on Thursday.
As he walks to a nearby car while holding a plastic bag and a holdall, another man can be seen running towards him.
ReutersOnline news site Ukrainska Pravda reports that the assailant had used a pistol and had shot the SBU officer five times, citing unnamed sources.
The apparent assassination follows what Ukraine described as the largest Russian aerial attack on Tuesday, when 728 drones and 13 cruise or ballistic missiles struck cities across the country.
Overnight into Thursday, a Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital killed at least two people and injured 16 others.
The strikes – which hit eight districts across the city – involved 18 missiles and 400 drones, officials said. Russia has been repeatedly accused of targeting civilian areas.
Meanwhile, fighting on the front line continues, with Russian forces slowly making advances in western Ukraine and retaking control of the part of Russia’s Kursk region that Ukrainian forces seized in a surprise offensive last summer.
Russia currently controls around a fifth of Ukrainian territory, including the southern Crimean peninsula it annexed in 2014.
Efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in the more than three-year-long war have faltered, with US President Donald Trump becoming increasingly impatient with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
