![]() ![]() Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation is conducting a probe into whether the National Guard acted unlawfully by surrendering its weapons to an enemy, a local official told Reuters. He declined to give names but said such traitors needed to be “neutralised” at all costs. “Apart from the external enemy, we unfortunately have an internal enemy, and this enemy is no less dangerous,” the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said in an interview.Īt the time of the invasion, Danilov said, Russia had agents in the Ukrainian defence, security and law enforcement sectors. The officials interviewed include people inside Russia who were briefed on Moscow’s invasion planning and Ukrainian investigators tasked with tracking down spies. Through interviews with dozens of officials in Russia and Ukraine and a review of Ukrainian court documents and statements to investigators, related to a probe into the conduct of people who worked at Chornobyl, Reuters has established that this infiltration reached far deeper than has been publicly acknowledged. Now a Reuters investigation has found that Russia’s success at Chornobyl was no accident, but part of a long-standing Kremlin operation to infiltrate the Ukrainian state with secret agents.įive people with knowledge of the Kremlin’s preparations said war planners around President Vladimir Putin believed that, aided by these agents, Russia would require only a small military force and a few days to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration to quit, flee or capitulate. The fall of Chornobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, stands out as an anomaly in the five-month old war: a successful blitzkrieg operation in a conflict marked elsewhere by a brutal and halting advance by Russian troops and grinding resistance by Ukraine. Russia had taken Chornobyl, a repository for tonnes of nuclear material and a key staging post on the approach to Kyiv. In less than two hours, and without a fight, the 169 members of the Ukrainian National Guard laid down their weapons. 24, they encountered a Ukrainian unit charged with defending the notorious facility. ![]() When the first armoured vehicles of Russia’s invading army reached the heart of Chornobyl nuclear plant on the afternoon of Feb. A Reuters investigation shows the infiltration went far deeper than has been acknowledged.īy MARI SAITO in Kyiv and MARIA TSVETKOVA in Paris Long before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin was building a network of secret agents to smooth its path. ![]()
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