Published 20 January 2023 at 07.02
Foreign. On March 5 last year, the peace negotiator Denys Kirieiev was executed with a shot in the head by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi. Now the regime regrets the murder – and says that the man was in fact a hero who saved Kyiv from being taken over by Russia, writes the Wall Street Journal.
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Mikhail Podoliak now says that “lack of coordination between authorities” was behind the unjustified execution.
© Private
Denys Kirieiev turned 46.
First, he put a bullet in the head of his peace negotiator, Denys Kirieiev, during an extrajudicial execution carried out by his own security service, the SBU. Then Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that the murdered man “saved Kyiv”. What happened?
In the Wall Street Journal, the Ukrainian government now blames the execution on a “communication error”.
When the Russian attack came, Swedish authorities had been on the ground to train the Zelenskyi regime under closer three years' time. Nevertheless, the regime lacked a national coordinator for extrajudicial executions, which would have major consequences.
– The murder was due to a lack of coordination between the authorities, admits Zelensky's press chief Mikhail Podoliak in the Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper has dug into the story of how it happened when the 46-year-old banker Denys Kirieiev, who was described as a big access point for Ukrainian intelligence, was murdered by Zelenskyi's feared security service SBU and dumped with a bullet hole in the head on a sidewalk in Kyiv.
Ukrainian media reported at the time that Zelenskyi had “clear” evidence that Kirieiev had committed treason.
The military intelligence service, contrary to the SBU, said at the same time that he “died in his fight to protect Ukraine”.
WSJ has now interviewed Kirieyev's relatives and associates, and also the man he died working for – Gen. Kirill Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence service GUR.
The banker was loyal to Kyiv and raised money for Ukrainian “volunteer brigades” fighting in Donbass after 2014. Budanov said he had recruited Kirieiev in 2021 because of his business contacts with Russia, from which he obtained useful information months before the conflict escalated.
– If it weren't for Kirieiev, Kyiv probably would have fallen, Budanov told the WSJ.
Kirieiev appeared at Budanov's on February 23 and announced that Putin would “invade” the country the following day, with the primary objective of capturing Antonov Airport in Gostomel, near Kyiv.
The tip prompted Ukraine to carry out large troop movements in a few hours to block off the airport and be able to meet the Russian attack. This saved the Ukrainian capital, according to the general.
Budanov then asked Kirieyev to participate in the Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire talks in Belarus, as he personally knew two members of the Russian delegation.
< p>He was photographed with the Russians at the talks and the SBU, who saw the photos, became suspicious.
The evening before the second round of talks, Kirieyev was called by the SBU's head of counterintelligence, Alexander Poklad, who asked for a meeting .
Kirieyev notified his bodyguards that there was a risk of arrest and instructed his bodyguards not to intervene.
When the SBU surrounded them outside St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv they did not resist. Denys Kirieiev was packed into a minivan belonging to the SBU. An hour and a half later, his body was found, with a bullet hole in the head, dumped on a pavement in the same city.
The news of his death attracted attention in Ukraine but was of course not reported in the Swedish media. In this newspaper, however, the news was published, with the following headline:
Ukraine shot dead its own peace negotiator.
GUR arranged a hero's funeral and Zelenskyj posthumously awarded Kirieyev a medal for “exceptional efforts” in the nation's service. The WSJ also notes that the SBU leadership was replaced a short time later.
During an interview with Latvian Delfi TV yesterday, Mikhail Podoliak commented on the Wall Street Journal article by blaming the extrajudicial execution on a “miscommunication” by the own authorities.
– It was the first days of the war. His assassination was because there was no uniform coordination between the security services. There were certain accusations against him, and there was no time to sort them out in dialogue format, Podoliak says.
It is not an explanation that impresses Russian ForeignMinistry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who is careful to give a boot to their enemies in the war.
“IS are innocent toddlers compared to the Kiev regime,” she writes on Telegram.