MOSCOW (Dispatches) -- Ukraine wanted to assassinate Russia’s chief of general staff Valery Gerasimov but U.S. officials tried to stop Ukraine from carrying out an assassination attempt on him, according to a report from New York Times.
Valery Gerasimov was evacuated from Ukraine back in May this year, after he suffered shrapnel injury.
According to Euroweekly news, Ukraine has admitted that they wanted to assassinate the Russian chief of general staff.
An adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office named Oleksiy Arestovych, admitted whilst speaking to journalist Mark Feygin that Ukrainian troops wanted to assassinate Gerasimov when he was on a trip to Izyum.
“Gerasimov was in Izyum and we were planning to hit him,” Oleksiy reportedly said to Mark, during an interview, discussing the New York Times story.
U.S. officials apparently knew where Gerasimov was but they withheld that information from the Ukrainians because they knew that the Ukrainians would attempt to take him out.
The U.S. feared his assassination would lead to a direct war between U.S. and Russia. When the Ukrainian troops eventually discovered Gerasimov’s office in Ukraine, and sws
Minister Sergei Shoigu inspected the country’s troops involved in Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, the defense ministry said on Sunday.
“The head of the Russian military flew around the areas of deployment of troops and checked the advanced positions of Russian units in the zone of the special military operation,” the ministry said on the Telegram messaging app.
The ministry said in the statement that Shoigu spoke with troops “on the frontline” and at a “command post.”