UKRAINIAN SPECIAL SERVICE FOILED IMAGINARY ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON PETRO POROSHENKO

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko. (Vincent Kessler/Reuters)

The Ukrainian media reported of a foiled assassination attempt on President Petro Poroshenko on October 23. The assassination had been planned to take course during his visit to Avdiivka.

“Security Service of Ukraine [ SBU] forces have dismantled a terrorist cell, that had planned to assassinate the President of Ukraine. Two cell members were killed during the operation,” Vesti Ukr’s report says refering a website of SBU as the original source of the information.

The killed had in their possession a Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifle, a Makarov pistol with two magazines, two anti-tank grenades, two hand grenades and three smoke grenades.

“The killed had taken part in Kyiv riots. The investigation is still ongoing,” the report added.

However, right now, the official Security Service of Ukraine website contains no report of the assassination attempt.

SBU later posted on its Facebook page that the report regarding the assassination attempt was fake, and was sent to the media outlets via the email address anonymousemail@orbit.eternalimpact.info that was “made to look like it was sent from the official press office email”. According to the post, the email came from “a neighboring country”. They also claim there had been no security breach.

If this is the case, this fact still reflects poorly on the state of cybersecurity of Security Service of Ukraine, which is systematically compromised, as claimed by the SPRUT hacker group.

The other possible explanation is that the news of an assassination attempt had been deemed too volatile for the current political climate in Ukraine, and the news was ordered to be pulled.

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