KYIV, Ukraine — The wife of Ukraine's military intelligence chief was poisoned and is recovering in a hospital, Ukrainian intelligence officials said Tuesday, an incident that has led to widespread speculation that Russia was stepping up its efforts to target Ukraine's top leadership.
Andriy Chernyak, an official with Ukraine's military intelligence agency, said Marianna Budanova had been poisoned and was receiving treatment.
Her husband, Kyrylo Budanov, is the head of the agency known as GUR and is one of the country's top military leaders.
Chernyak declined to speculate on the perpetrator or the type of poison used and did not elaborate, citing the ongoing investigation.
Agency spokesman Andriy Yusov later issued a statement with a similar account of the incident and said more information would be released as the investigation progressed.
The Ukrainian news channel Babel was the first to report Budanova's alleged poisoning.
He said that doctors had found in Budanova's body a large amount of heavy metals that "are not used in any way in everyday life or in military matters."
Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence, center, attends a commemorative event marking the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war in Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2023. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, File)
Budanova had not fallen ill, Ukrainian officials said.
News that Budanova had been poisoned immediately sparked suspicions in Ukraine that Russia, which has a long historyof using poison as a tool to take revenge and eliminate perceived enemies, may have been responsible.
Budanov has often stated that Russia planned to kill him, and Yusov claimed this summer that there had been at least 10 attempts by Russia to do so.
The circumstances of the poisoning and how Budanova was affected were not immediately clear.
But Budanov told Radio Liberty earlier this year that since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, his wife, a psychologist who worked as an anti-corruption adviser to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, had essentially moved into her husband's office.
If Russia was able to poison Budanova, it would suggest that its agents were operating closer to the inner circles of power in Kiev than previously thought possible.
Viktor Yahun, former deputy head of the national intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, has been involved in previous investigations into poisonings and said more information was needed before it was possible to assess the Budanova case.
But Yahun said she would be surprised if Russia had agents in Ukraine who could get close to Budanova or her husband.
"He doesn't have the kind of agents on the territory of Ukraine to poison someone," he said.
However, Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview before the poisoning was announced that Russia was activating sleeper agents and stepping up its efforts to destabilize the Kiev government.
Plan
"In 2003, Putin set himself the task of destroying our country, and during all this time his tasks have not changed," he said.
"Considering that the Russian Federation does not have the capacity to win by military means, it is now using all its agent networks, which, unfortunately, still exist. And now we're seeing its maximum activation."
Budanov has an inordinate public profile for the head of a clandestine agency and is often portrayed in the media as masterminding some of the most audacious attacks on Russian targets behind enemy lines.
Fond of carrying a gun on his hip when meeting with journalists, Budanov said Ukraine has the right to assassinate Russian war criminals anywhere in the world where they try to hide.
He is proud of the comparisons made between his agency and the Israeli Mossad.
"They've been trying to accuse me of terrorism since 2016," he said in an interview.
"What they call 'terrorism,' we call liberation."
Russia has targeted senior Ukrainian leaders in the past, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to Ukrainian officials.
Zelenskyy has stated that he no longer shudders when he learns of new plots against his life.
"The first one is very interesting," he said in a recent interview with British tabloid The Sun, "and then it's the same as COVID."
In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, then a candidate for the Ukrainian opposition, fell ill and developed a wide range of painful and disfiguring ailments that plagued him during the last three months of the presidential campaign.
His opponents ridiculed his claims that he had been poisoned, saying the once-telegenic candidate had fallen ill from eating spoiled sushi or drinking too much.
But doctors in Vienna later determined that he had been poisoned with dioxin, a highly toxic waste product of various industrial chemical processes.
After it was revealed that Yushchenko had been poisoned, Alexander Litvinenko, who served in the KGB and its Russian successor, the Federal Security Service, from 1988 to 1999, told The New York Times that Russian intelligence believes that "poison is just a weapon, like a gun."
Less than two years later, Litvinenko died of poisoning with a rare radioactive isotope.
A comprehensive 328-page report by a retired British High Court judge concluded that there was "strong circumstantial evidence of Russian state responsibility" and that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the head of the FSB likely sanctioned the killing.
In 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, was found writhing alongside his unconscious daughter on a park bench in Salisbury, England, both poisoned, British authorities later said, with a potent nerve agent administered by two officers from Russia's military intelligence agency.
And in 2020, Alexei Navalny, a now-imprisoned Russian opposition leader, accused the Kremlin of trying to assassinate him by putting a deadly chemical in his underpants.
An investigation by Freedom House found at least 23 documented cases of transnational aggression since 2014, including poisoning attempts, most likely orchestrated by Russia.
After almost every case, Russia mounted a vigorous disinformation campaign aimed at distancing the government from the killings.
Poison has long been the tool of choice for killers because it can be tasteless, odorless, and difficult to detect.
It can lead to symptoms that mimic natural diseases, causing confusion and complicating investigations.
But poisons don't always work and can be affected by variables such as dosage, method of administration, and the health of the target.
Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist known for her scathing criticism of Kremlin policies, suspected she had been poisoned after losing consciousness after drinking tea on a flight in Russia.
She survived, but was shot dead in a contract killing in her Moscow apartment block in 2006.
The man convicted of his murder was recently pardoned by Putin for his military service in Ukraine.
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