Ukrainian spy colonel gunned down in Kyiv, assailant flees

By Tom Balmforth

(Reuters) -A senior Ukrainian security officer was gunned down in a residential parking lot in Kyiv on Thursday before his assailant fled on foot in broad daylight, according to authorities and video footage verified by Reuters.

Kyiv's police force said it was working to identify the shooter and that "measures are being taken to detain him". The slain agent was a colonel in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), an official told Reuters.

The SBU, a sprawling domestic spy agency which has thousands of staff, said it had opened a criminal investigation into the murder of one of its employees in Kyiv's southern Holosiivskyi district. They did not identify him.

The agency's remit covers security and counterintelligence, but since Russia's 2022 invasion it has also played a prominent role in special operations against Moscow, including assassinations and sabotage attacks.

Those include an extraordinary drone operation codenamed Spider's Web that targeted Russian strategic aircraft at bases hundreds of miles from Ukraine, and the assassination of a top Russian general in Moscow using a bomb hidden in a scooter.

Neither the SBU nor the police mentioned possible motives for the killing in Kyiv.

"The Security Service and the National Police are taking a comprehensive set of measures to clarify all the circumstances of the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice," the SBU said in a statement.

Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda cited a source saying the assailant fired five rounds from a pistol. It identified his victim as Ivan Voronych, an SBU colonel.

Some pro-Kremlin military bloggers cheered the death of the colonel. Alexander Kots, a Russian war correspondent, said he hoped the Russian security services were behind his death. "The enemy must feel afraid on its own territory."

Russian officials have not publicly commented.

CCTV footage circulated on Ukrainian social media showed a man in jeans leaving a residential building and walking to a car park where he was approached by another man, who fired at him repeatedly before running away.

Reuters was able to confirm the location of the video of the purported killing as a neighbourhood in Kyiv, using the guard box, buildings and parking lot layout, which match file and satellite imagery of the area.

The date when the video was recorded was verified using the timestamp on the footage and Reuters reporting of the incident.

(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; additional reporting by Aaron McNicholas; editing by Alex Richardson and Andrew Heavens)