12 hours ago
4
The Ukrainian wing of an internationally proscribed far-right terrorist organization with suspected links to Russia is claiming involvement in the brazen assassination of an intelligence officer in Kyiv.
Late last week, a masked assailant shot and killed Col Ivan Voronych of the Ukraine security service (SBU) as he walked through a Kyiv parking lot in broad daylight. Shocking footage of the assassination circulated in Ukrainian media and caused a stir among residents in the capital.
For months, the Base, born in the US and with a web of cells all over the world, has been offering money to supporters or willing participants for targeted assassinations and attacks on the critical infrastructure of Ukraine, coinciding with allegations that its American founder, Rinaldo Nazzaro, was a Kremlin spy. Ukrainian authorities have also been warning in recent weeks of similar Russian intelligence operations covertly paying unknowing citizens to carry out sabotage inside their country.
“The shooting of the SBU colonel is not the end, but only the beginning,” said a statement posted on a Telegram channel that appears to be linked to the the Base’s supposed Ukrainian cell. “We will continue our struggle until justice prevails.”
The same post, translated from Ukrainian, added that the group’s members were “proud of our associates” who carried out the killing and said they didn’t care if naysayers thought of them as “terrorists and extremists”. In another message to subscribers, the account also threatens other Ukrainian public figures and promises: “The hunt continues!”
Sources in the counter-terrorism field reviewed the posts and said they appeared credible and represented an escalation from the Base, which is now either endorsing treasonous murders inside of Ukraine, actively commissioning them, or both.
On Sunday, the SBU announced it had killed the two suspects they say were instructed and supplied with a pistol to assassinate Voronych on behalf of “Russian special services” handlers. Other media reports in Ukraine reported the assassins were foreign nationals linked to criminal groups and were remotely supported by Russian intelligence.
Although originally a stateside extremist group, the Base had never publicly allied itself to the geopolitical goals of the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin, until very recently.
In April, the Base started waging what it described as an insurgency to establish an all-white ethnostate in the western Ukrainian oblast of Zakarpattia. So far, videos of arson attacks against what appear to be police and military vehicles, electric boxes and other targets have been uploaded to its accounts on Telegram, along with dozens of other geolocated videos inside Ukraine.
Nazzaro, who is a former Pentagon contractor with the US special forces, declined to comment on the Ukraine cell of the Base and the killing when reached on his Telegram account.
“I have no personal involvement in this incident and I don’t know who is responsible,” he added.
Previously, he had publicly endorsed the group’s Ukraine operations on Telegram and said it was being overseen by members inside the country that he did not control.
after newsletter promotion
Multiple requests for comment sent to a chatbot and an active email address associated with the Ukrainian cell went unanswered.
“The Base has been highly active in Ukraine since March and has conducted at least 10 arson attacks targeting infrastructure and buildings throughout the country,” said Steven Rai, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) who has been closely monitoring the Base’s online activities. “They have repeatedly threatened a variety of terrorist actions, including acts of sabotage and the assassination of Ukrainian government officials.”
Rai continued: “While we cannot confirm whether the Base was truly responsible for this recent assassination of an SBU official, this action is very much in line with what they have been threatening to do for months and shows the severity of the threat they pose.”
In 2018, the Base became the subject of a relentless FBI counter-terrorism investigation that led to dozens of arrests and governments around the world designating it as a terrorist organization. Recently, the Base has doubled down on its recruitment efforts in Europe, and, with several new national cells across the continent – it has regrown its ranks inside the US and is clearly exporting its brand abroad – just as the Trump administration continues pulling FBI resources away from domestic terrorism investigations.
Nazzaro, who lives the life of a semi-defected American in St Petersburg with his Russian wife and family, has for years denied any associations with Russian intelligence, going so far as to tell a Kremlin-controlled television channel that he had “never had any contact with any Russian security services”.
But the digital forensics of the group and Nazzaro’s public history say otherwise: the Base’s online footprints rely heavily on Russian digital infrastructure, with its recruitment email using a Mail.ru address – the email service owned by a Putin ally. Nazzaro has never been charged publicly in the US, but was the subject of an FBI investigation and was once called a justice department “matter” by a US government official.
