'People Were Brought In Through Belarus': This Is How They Were Going To Kill Zelensky

The Russians wanted to kill the Ukrainian president at the very beginning of the war.

Investigator Christo Grozev spoke in an interview with journalist Mykhailo Zygar about how the assassination of Zelensky was planned at the very beginning of the war.

People from the GRU came to Kyiv to kill Zelensky. According to Grozev, there was more than one group of them. People from this organisation got into Ukraine a couple of weeks before the war started.

"They were brought through Belarus to be close to Kyiv. Some of them entered Kyiv and they were preparing the takeover of the political quarter of the city."

They were people subordinate to Andrei Averyanov (the GRU general in charge of the unit suspected of a series of poisonings and bombings in Europe), there were 30 of them. It is a very elite group, says Grozev. These are the very people who blew up the warehouses in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, who poisoned the Skripals.

"We traced the communications of several members of this team. And it was both scary and funny. Scary because we saw what their goals were. And funny because they were becoming less and less hurray-patriotic by the day and began to criticise the leadership for the poorly planned operation.

The GRU officers first thought that they would be in Ukraine for a week, then they were writing to their wives: "Well, it will take two weeks". After that they were writing about a month, six months. Some of them started to doubt the fidelity of their wives afterwards."

"You can write a novel about it, about how this team, which was supposed to bring the victory in a week, became the psychological victims of this very war," notes the investigator.

Some of them, Grozev says, were killed.

He comments on the current GRU operations in Ukraine: "They do not have such mega goals as to kill Zelensky anymore. Apparently, they have completely failed in this regard."

Grozev adds that the GRU has trained new officers for international operations, they are 10-15 years younger than the previous ones (born in 1993-1999).