Ukraine’s security service said Monday that it had detained a woman from the country’s Mykolaiv region who has been accused of trying to gather intelligence for Russia on the movements of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The suspected informant had “tried” to establish the timing and route that Zelenskyy would take for a visit to the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine, the agency said in a statement. The Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, also accused the woman of working to locate Ukrainian ammunition store points and electronic warfare systems in the area, saying it had intelligence that showed Russia sought the information in order to plan a “massive airstrike” in Mykolaiv — but did not specify whether Zelenskyy was the intended target.
“Officers detained the woman red-handed in her attempt to pass intelligence to the Russians,” the statement added, without providing further details.
The accusations could not be independently verified, and there was no immediate comment from the Kremlin or Russia’s Ministry of Defense.
The agency did not specify the dates of Zelenskyy’s visit but said the agency had detected the woman’s efforts and employed additional security measures ahead of time.
Zelenskyy has made at least two trips to the Mykolaiv region in the past two months. He traveled to the area in June to assess the damage from flooding after the breach of the Kakhovka Dam and again last month, when he visited hospitals and met with doctors in the city of Ochakiv.
In its statement Monday, the agency did not name the woman or when she had been detained, saying only that she was a resident of Ochakiv who had previously worked as a salesperson in a Ukrainian military store. She has been placed in custody and could face up to 12 years in prison, it added.
Concerns about Zelenskyy’s security have persisted since the early days of the war. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in late February 2022, Moscow’s forces targeted Zelenskyy in their assault on the capital, Kyiv. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said that March that there had been “more than a dozen attempts” to kill Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy has been asked many times about how he feels to be the target of so many assassination attempts.
“It becomes repetitive — you remember that film ‘Groundhog Day’?” he joked in an interview with Axios in May 2022, adding: “I wake up in the morning and it’s still the same.”
Although Zelenskyy did not comment directly Monday on the news from the Security Service, he said in a statement that in meetings he had been briefed by the agency’s chief about “the struggle against traitors” in Ukraine.
The country has been waging a war against spies and collaborators giving help to Russian forces while its soldiers simultaneously confront them on the battlefield. Since the invasion, fears have run high that Russian sympathizers would share the locations of sensitive Ukrainian targets — and Zelenskyy has taken an aggressive approach to going after any potential collaborators.
In July 2022, he dismissed two senior law enforcement officials, saying they had not been nearly aggressive enough in weeding out traitors.
U.S. COOPERATION
The U.S. Justice Department is cooperating with the International Criminal Court and supporting Ukrainian prosecutors carrying out war crime investigations, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday as he reaffirmed his department’s aid more than a year after the Russian invasion.
Congress recently allowed for new U.S. flexibility in assisting the court with investigations into foreign nationals related to Ukraine, and the Justice Department will be a key part of the United States’ cooperation, Garland said.
“We are not waiting for the hostilities to end before pursuing justice and accountability. We are working closely with our international partners to gather evidence and build cases so that we are ready when the time comes to hold the perpetrators accountable,” he said in a speech to the American Bar Association in Denver.
He appointed a prosecutor to serve at a center opened last month in The Hague to support nations building cases against senior Russian leaders for the crime of aggression. The International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression will not issue indictments or arrest warrants for suspects but will instead support investigations already underway in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
The ICC does not have jurisdiction to prosecute aggression in Ukraine because Russia and Ukraine have not ratified the Rome Statute that founded the court, though Ukraine’s prosecutor general has said they plan to join.
The United States also is not an ICC member state. Since the Treaty of Rome, which established the court, took effect, successive U.S. administrations beginning during Bill Clinton’s presidency have taken a largely hands-off approach toward the ICC due to concerns it might open investigations and prosecute American soldiers or senior officials.
Although it is not a member of the court, the U.S. has cooperated with the ICC in the past on war crimes issues, notably during the Obama administration when Washington contributed evidence to the investigation into atrocities allegedly committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and surrounding states in east Africa.
However, American antipathy toward the tribunal reached new heights during the Trump administration when it imposed sanctions on the former ICC chief prosecutor and several aides for pursuing investigations into alleged war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and Israeli service members in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Biden administration rescinded those sanctions shortly after taking office, and its decision to actively assist the court with Ukraine investigations marks another step toward cooperation with the ICC.
The Justice Department is giving wide-ranging assistance to Ukraine, from training on prosecuting environmental crimes to help developing a secure electronic case-management system for more than 90,000 suspected atrocity crimes. Garland also touted the $500 million seized assets and over three dozen indictments the department has handed down to enforce sanctions.
“Ukraine must do three things simultaneously: it must fight a war; it must investigate war crimes; and it must ensure that a just society comes out on the other side of the war,” Garland said. The Justice Department is “honored to stand with them.”
Garland also encouraged more private lawyers to volunteer to help Ukrainian victims. He recalled how his grandmother and his wife’s family were able to flee Europe as refugees to the United States and avoid the Holocaust. Other relatives were killed by the Nazis.
“We do not know if anyone involved in their deaths were held accountable,” Garland said. “The families of the victims of the current atrocities in Ukraine deserve to know what happened to their loved ones. They deserve justice.”
Information for this article was contributed by staff writers of The New York Times and by Lindsay Whitehurst, Nicholas Riccardi and Matt Lee of The Associated Press.
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