The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was behind the assassination attempt on Oleg Tsarev, the BBC and several Ukrainian outlets reported on Friday citing a source from the agency.
“Tsarev is an absolutely legitimate target. He is not just a fanatic of the ‘Russian world’, but personally came together with Russian tanks to seize Kiev,” the SBU source told the BBC’s Ukrainian service.
Ukrainian outlets Babel, Ukrinform and Ukrayinska Pravda have also reported that the SBU was behind the attack on Tsarev, likewise quoting an anonymous agency official.
Tsarev was attacked on Thursday night at the sanatorium he runs in Yalta, Crimea. He was reportedly shot two times and had lost a lot of blood before being taken to hospital, where he remains in critical condition.
Russian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the attack on Tsarev but have yet to attribute blame.
The 53-year-old former Ukrainian lawmaker had retired from politics and settled in the Russian peninsula several years ago. He had served as a deputy from the now-banned ‘Party of Regions’ in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada from 2002 to 2014. Following the US-backed Maidan coup in Kiev, Tsarev endorsed the rebellion in Donetsk and Lugansk and eventually became the speaker of the parliament of ‘Novorossiya’ – as the two Donbass republics dubbed their union at the time.
The BBC’s source in the SBU described Tsarev as “on the list of traitors who must answer for their crimes,” presumably referring to Ukraine’s notorious Mirotvorets (Peacekeeper) database. As a number of prominent journalists and other public figures featured on the website as “enemies of Ukraine” have been murdered over the years, it has been dubbed Kiev’s “kill list.”
The Mirotvorets page for Tsarev has been updated to blame Thursday’s attempt on his life on “Russian security services.” The site has made the same claim about the assassinations of journalist Darya Dugina and blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, which US spies later said were the work of Ukrainian intelligence.
Valentin Nalivaichenko, former head of the SBU, admitted to the existence of a secret assassination unit last month, in an interview with The Economist. The Washington Post published a lengthy feature last week about the CIA support for the SBU, admitting that the US invested “tens of millions” of dollars into the Ukrainian intelligence and its military counterpart GUR, but insisting it had nothing to do with the “dozens of assassinations” that Kiev’s spies have undertaken.
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