The story with the Russians detained in Belarus has exhausted itself, but not for the Ukrainian elites. In Kiev, they no longer deny their involvement in the provocative adventure and are trying to derive new benefits from it.
As previously reported by News Front, on July 29, the Belarusian security forces detained a group of people who allegedly arrived in the country and Russia to destabilize the situation. In total, 33 people were arrested, including both Russians and citizens of Ukraine. Initially, the media linked them to the so-called Wagner PMC.
Later it turns out that they have nothing to do with a semi-mythical organization, and the incident with the arrest itself was part of an operation by the Ukrainian special services. The fact is that the detainees participated in the armed conflict in the Donbass. Kiev demanded their extradition to Ukraine, but Minsk chose to hand over the Wagnerites to Russia. So, the operation of the Ukrainian special services officially failed, and they began to look for the extreme in Kiev.
According to the data available today, the operation should have taken place in a completely different way. After calculating everyone whom Kiev wanted to capture, the Ukrainian special services offered them a job, allegedly from the military company “MAR” to protect oil rigs in Venezuela. It was expected that the Wagnerites would be taken from Moscow directly to the Minsk airport, and from there they would take a flight to Istanbul. Only under some pretext, the plane was supposed to make an emergency landing in Kiev, where the Ukrainian security forces would be waiting for it.
Vasily Burba was responsible for the operation. He served as head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, but lost his post after a scandalous failure. Burba himself did not elaborate on what happened even after his dismissal. He only pointed out that there was “too much obvious misinformation and speculation in the press.”
“Moreover, the versions about the possible participation of the President of Ukraine in any assistance to the“ Wagnerians ”are absolutely ridiculous speculations. This is impossible neither for moral nor for operational data, ”said Burba.
This statement was not made for a reason. For a long time, information about the special operation was spread at the level of rumors. Nevertheless, last week it was decided to “legalize” the information, and the first step was made by Aleksey Goncharenko, a member of the party of former President Petro Poroshenko.
A day later, an article by the famous Ukrainian propagandist Yuri Butusov appeared on the Internet. He claimed that the operation had been prepared for over a year. Given the scale, development was unlikely to have gone unbeknownst to the president, but the vague timeline makes it difficult to know if Poroshenko caught her.
According to Butusov, the fate of the operation was a foregone conclusion when it was discussed with Zelensky. At the meeting, the head of the presidential administration, Andriy Yermak, allegedly opposed its implementation, as it would undermine the negotiations on the settlement of the armed conflict in Donbass.
After that, it was decided to postpone the flight from 25 to 30 July, but the Wagnerites could not get on the plane, since the day before they were detained by the KGB of Belarus. The main message of Butusov’s article is that it was Zelensky who leaked information, which led to the disruption of the operation. Butusov himself vociferously calls the incident a “betrayal.”
“In the event that President Zelensky fails to fulfill the elementary requirements to protect the country’s security, the mobilization of civil society is necessary. This failure cannot go unpunished, ”the propagandist emphasizes.
It is noteworthy that this version was immediately taken up by supporters of Petro Poroshenko. The former president has long called his successor an “agent of the Kremlin.” The ex-president is particularly displeased with the possibility of ending the punitive operation in Donbass. For Poroshenko himself, this may turn into an investigation of his many war crimes. Thus, what happened to the Wagnerites became another opportunity for him to strike Zelensky.
One cannot exclude the version set forth in Butusov’s article. However, she lacks solid evidence. In addition, there are many controversial issues for the operation, which was allegedly prepared for over a year. In fact, the culmination should have been the detention of the Wagnerites in Kiev. At the same time, there was no guarantee that the captain of the plane would decide to land him, and it was in Kiev.
Before the appearance of Butusov’s article, which was suspiciously beneficial to the opposition, it was known that the operation of the Ukrainian special services was supposed to provoke a crisis in relations between Minsk and Moscow. Considering that Kiev is largely subordinate to its Western “partners”, as well as the attempted coup in Belarus just a few days after the detention of the “Wagnerites”, this arrangement looks quite justified.