Security Service says it prevented assassination of Ukrainian MP

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) says that on Jan. 20 it detained two men plotting to assassinate a Ukrainian member of parliament by placing a bomb in his car, Vasyl Grytsak, head of the SBU, said at a briefing on Jan. 21. “According to our information, the assassination was prepared and controlled by Russia,” Grytsak said.

Although Grytsak refused to reveal the lawmaker’s name because a key suspect remained at large, People’s Front lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko said he was the target. Later in the day, Interior Ministry advisor Zoryan Shkiryak also claimed that the killers targeted Gerashchenko, who is also an adviser to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

“It was the second birthday for me,” Gerashchenko said in a Facebook post about the prepared assassination attempt. “I’m so grateful to the SBU head Grytsak and to all the staff of the counterintelligence department of SBU and the fighters of Alfa special squad whose names I can’t reveal.”

The lawmaker said that SBU officers “worked from dusk till dawn” to track, identify and arrest the allegedly Kremlin-backed people.

Gerashchenko said that his failed attackers were going to blow up his car in a fashion similar to that of the assassination of Ukrainska Pravda journalist Pavel Sheremet. Sheremet was murdered in July in Kyiv. The attackers set up an explosive device in Sheremet’s car. The investigation of the murder still goes on, no arrests took place so far.

Grytsak said that the organizer of Gerashchenko’s assassination attempt was a resident of Kharkiv Oblast who joined Kremlin-backed separatists of Luhansk Oblast after the start of Russia’s war in the Donbas in 2014 and was patronizing sabotage acts on the territories controlled by the Ukrainian government. “T”, as Grytsak called him, is currently based in Russia.

“He hired two Ukrainians from Donetsk and Crimea with the criminal background to kill a Ukrainian lawmaker. They had been tracking his movement in the city since Dec. 14, were spotted near the victim’s house and workplace (the Verkhovna Rada),” said Grytsak.

As proof, Grytsak demonstrated a videotape showing two men standing in Mariyinskiy Park near the building of the Verkhovna Rada, talking about their victim. In a recorded conversation, the assassins were complaining that they had to wait too long for Gerashchenko to show up near the Rada.

The Security Service searched a rented Kyiv apartment that the unsuccessful attackers lived in, and found explosive devices, cell phones and a portrait of the target. A pre-trial investigation is going on.

Gerashchenko linked the assassination attempt to his anti-Russian position and his patronizing of the so-called counter-terroristic Ukrainian website Myrotvorets, connected to the Interior Ministry.

Myrotvorets has been publishing the data about the Russian-backed separatists and pro-Russian activists.

On May 9, Myrotvorets published a list of nearly 4,500 foreign and Ukrainian journalists who have received press accreditation from the Russian-backed armed groups that are in control of parts of Donetsk Oblast. The website called the journalists traitors.

The leak of the list, allegedly obtained in a hacker attack on the separatists’ computers, outraged many in Ukraine’s and international media community and civil society.

Foreign journalists and organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe condemned the publication, saying that it endangered reporters working in the Donbas war zone.

When the website was shut down on May 13, Gerashchenko started a social media campaign “I support Myrotvorets.”  Soon it was reopened and in August gained an official status of a media outlet.

“I want to warn the organizers of my assassination: Myrotvorets, which has become a burr under your saddle, will continue its work whether I’m alive or not,” Gerashchenko wrote.