According to Ukrainian government officials and news sources,

President of Ukraine The president of Ukraine (, ) is the head of state of Ukraine. The president represents the nation in international relations, administers the foreign political activity of the state, conducts negotiations and concludes international treaties. ...

Volodymyr Zelenskyy Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former entertainer who has served as the sixth and current president of Ukraine since 2019. He took office five years after the start of the Russo-Ukraini ...

has survived a number of assassination and kidnapping attempts by Russian or pro-Russian agents during the

Russian invasion of Ukraine On 24 February 2022, , starting the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, conflict between the two countries which began in 2014. The fighting has caused hundreds of thou ...

Background

According to Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, Russia planned to achieve a quick victory during the invasion by sending groups into the Ukrainian capital,

Kyiv Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...

, to eliminate Ukraine's leadership. He stated that "Russia's key intention asto remove the country's top leadership, create maximum panic, and try to establish its own

puppet government A puppet state, puppet régime, puppet government or dummy government is a State (polity), state that is ''de jure'' independent but ''de facto'' completely dependent upon an outside Power (international relations), power and subject to its ord ...

Attempts

2022

According to the Ukrainian government, in early February 2022, Russian president

Vladimir Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Ru ...

instructed Chechen leader

Ramzan Kadyrov Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov (born 5 October 1976) is a Russian politician and current head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly affiliated with the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Chechen independence movement, through his father who was the ...

to eliminate Ukrainian leaders. In early March, Ukraine intelligence said that Chechen commandos sent to assassinate Zelenskyy had been "eliminated", with help from FSB agents sympathetic to Ukraine. In February 2022, Redut PMC was ordered on a covert mission in the Kyiv region to infiltrate and eliminate the political leadership and the Ukrainian Secret Service, by storming those institutions. More than one thousand fighters entered the Kyiv region for this purpose, however the mission failed due to the Ukrainian government having prior intel regarding the plan, resulting in Redut losing up to 90% of their fighting force. More than 400 Russian mercenaries from the

Wagner Group The Wagner Group (), officially known as PMC Wagner (, ), is a Russian state-funded private military company (PMC) controlled 2023 Wagner Group plane crash, until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Pu ...

were reported to have been in Kyiv by late February 2022, with orders to assassinate Zelenskyy and destabilise the government enough for Russia to take control.

2023

In August 2023, it was reported that another assassination attempt had been stopped after Ukraine's security service arrested a woman who was suspected of gathering information on Zelenskyy's trip to the

Mykolaiv Oblast Mykolaiv Oblast (, ), also referred to as Mykolaivshchyna (, ), is an administrative divisions of Ukraine, oblast (province) of Ukraine. The administrative center of the oblast is the city of Mykolaiv. At the most recent estimate, the population ...

2024

In April 2024, a man was arrested in

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

and was allegedly tasked with collecting information about Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport, which is used by Zelenskyy, alongside possible aid towards Russian intelligence services on an assassination of him. In May 2024, two Ukrainian colonels were arrested for treason in an alleged plot by the FSB to create a network of agents in an attempt to subdue those close to Zelenskyy and eventually take hostage and kill the President. The arrested colonels were members of the State Security Administration, and three FSB members — Maxim Mishustin, Dmytro Perlin and Oleksiy Korne — were identified as those formulating the plot. Kyrylo Budanov, a Ukrainian general, was reported to be the first to be assassinated in the plan, originally to be carried out prior to Orthodox Easter Sunday on May 5.

Number of attempts

During the conflict there were conflicting accounts of the number of assassination attempts made against Zelenskyy. Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak referenced the issue while speaking to the Ukrainian Pravda news outlet, saying, "Our foreign partners are talking about two or three attempts. I believe that there were more than a dozen attempts". In addition, on Saturday, 26 February 2022, an assassination attempt by a group of Chechen mercenaries was prevented on the outskirts of Kyiv with the would be assassins killed. In early March 2022, the head of Ukraine's National Security Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said that Zelenskyy had survived three assassination attempts in one week. Danilov credited the aid of anti-war intelligence officers within Russia's FSB who shared information with Ukrainian forces about the planned attacks by two groups of assassins from Chechnya.

Response

During an interview with

CBS News CBS News is the news division of the American television and radio broadcaster CBS. It is headquartered in New York City. CBS News television programs include ''CBS Evening News'', ''CBS Mornings'', news magazine programs ''CBS News Sunday Morn ...

on 6 March 2022, U.S. secretary of state

Antony Blinken Antony John Blinken (born April 16, 1962) is an American lawyer and diplomat who served as the 71st United States secretary of state from 2021 to 2025. He previously served as Deputy National Security Advisor, deputy national security advisor ...

said that the Ukrainian government had prepared for the potential death of Zelenskyy in the invasion, but would not disclose additional details.

References

{{Volodymyr Zelenskyy Events affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine Zelenskyy State-sponsored terrorism Volodymyr Zelenskyy Wagner Group activities in Ukraine Russian intelligence operations Zelenskyy