According to Kyrylo Budanov, the head of military intelligence, there have been multiple attempts to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“But as you can see, they were not successful,” Budanov told New Voice, a Ukrainian website. The general did not say what his claim was based on. He also did not say whether his or other Ukrainian intelligence services might have been involved in the plans.
Budanov has made provocative remarks in the past, as a form of psychological warfare. The Kremlin responded, with a spokesman Dmitry Peskov making it clear that the president’s security would be protected. “The threat from the Kiev regime is clear,” he told the state news agency TASS in Moscow.
Budanov went on to say that Putin is no longer a compromise figure accepted by the Russian elite, but that Russians are afraid of losing him because he has been in power for more than 20 years.
He said he imagines the reaction to Putin’s death will be similar to the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953. For people in the Soviet Union at the time, “their whole world had collapsed, they didn’t know how to live,” Budanov said.
Little is known about attempted assassinations of Putin during his long time in power. An assassination attempt by men from the Caucasus failed in May 2022, shortly after Putin ordered the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Budanov said. There is no evidence for that.