“He told me that there was a hit list, and that there were people willing to finance it being carried out.”
And what did you say?
“I agreed of course… If you refuse a request like this you probably end up dead.”
The broad-smiling, blond-bearded, would-be killer – Oleksiy Tsymbaliuk – is sitting next to me in my car.
Tsymbaliuk, a former Orthodox priest, is the unlikely starting point for the extraordinary tale of how the Ukrainian security service says it faked a murder in order to stop a murder. In doing so, it tried to expose what it says is Russia’s involvement in the killing of political opponents.
