Ukraine’s Zelensky fires bodyguard chief after Russian assassination plot foiled
- Dismissal came after the Ukrainian secret service uncovered Russian plots against president
- Volodymyr Zelensky has been a target of several assassination attempts since Russia invaded in 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the head of the department responsible for his personal protection after two of its officers were detained this week over an alleged assassination plot.
Zelensky on Thursday published a decree to “dismiss Sergiy Leonidovich Rud from the post of head of the State Protection Department of Ukraine”. It did not state a reason for Rud’s removal or name a replacement to the highly sensitive position.
The announcement came after Ukraine’s SBU security service announced Tuesday it had foiled a Russian plot to assassinate Zelensky and other senior officials.
It said it had detained two colonels from the bodyguard department on suspicion of passing secret information to Russia’s rival FSB security service. One of them, it alleged, had personally provided rocket rounds, drones and anti-personnel mines for an agent to carry out attacks.
Rud, 47, had headed the department – which oversees the personal security of the president, other senior officials and their families – since 2019.
It’s not the first time that Zelensky and his key officials may have been the target of an assassination attempt since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than two years ago.
The Ukrainian president told the Sun newspaper in November that his intelligence services had foiled at least five or six plots to kill him.
Polish and Ukrainian prosecutors announced last month they had detained a man suspected of aiding a Russian plot to assassinate Zelensky.
And the SBU said last August that a woman had been arrested for over a plot to kill the Ukrainian leader by trying to uncover details of his movements outside Kyiv.
Also on Thursday, the president also replaced the commander of his special forces, the second time in half a year that he has changed the head of the unit which operates in Moscow-occupied territories.
The dismissal of Colonel Serhiy Lupanchuk and appointment of Brigadier General Oleksandr Trepak in his place was announced in two decrees on the president’s website that provided no explanation for the move.
Since 2014, Trepak has been actively taking part in defence operations in east Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists. He was engaged in leading the push to repel the Russian assault on Donetsk airport, one of the biggest operations back then.
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The Ukrainian military’s chain of command has been changed at different levels since February when Zelensky replaced his top commander, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, with then-ground forces commander Oleksandr Syrskyi in a major shake-up.
At the time, Zelensky said a new military leadership was taking control of the armed forces and promised to “reboot” the system by bringing in experienced commanders who understood the daily needs of the troops.
The shake-up came at an uncertain time for Ukraine, with Russian troops beginning to advance in the east, taking advantage of shortages of Ukrainian manpower at the front as well as dwindling stocks of artillery shells.
In a separate decree, Zelensky also reappointed Dmytro Hereha as commander of the army’s support forces, a post he was dismissed from without any explanation in March.
Lupanchuk was appointed to lead the special forces last November following the sudden dismissal of his predecessor Viktor Horenko.
Horenko’s dismissal was seen at the time as a sign of a growing rift between Zelensky and his then top commander, who was fired months later.
The special forces do not have a public profile, but are thought to have been involved in Ukraine’s most ambitious operations in Russian-held areas and in particular the peninsula of Crimea.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters
