Three assassins, three puzzles

Farion, Sternenko, Hanul. Staged killings. SBU-FSB hall of mirrors.

Today’s topic is assassinations. One failed attempt - that which took place in April 2025 against Serhiy Sternenko - and two successful ones - the July 2024 assassination of Iryna Farion, and the March 2025 killing of Demyan Hanul.

The first thing that unites them is the target - well-known Ukrainian ethnonationalists. The second is the murkiness of what actually happened.

Of course, mainstream Ukrainian media discourse naturally lays the blame on the Kremlin. However, no evidence actually proving that to be the case has been provided by law enforcement.

Meanwhile, another more interesting narrative has also been emerging in all three cases, especially those of Hanul and Sternenko - that the killers believed themselves to be working for Ukrainian intelligence. They thought that their target was in fact an enemy of Ukraine.

If they weren’t working for Ukrainian intelligence, they were apparently working in the name of Ukrainian interests. In the case of the Farion murder, the official version is that her young killer was a neo-nazi who blamed her for dividing Ukrainian unity with her diatribes against Russian-speaking Ukrainians. This is particularly interesting, since this assassin was also linked to NS/WP, the network of Russian neo-nazis I wrote about recently due to their links to the would-be Trump assassin.

In any case, it’s time to have a look at these cryptic cases. Russian FSB? Ukrainian SBU? One pretending to be the other pretending to be the other? Or simply some good old-fashioned lone wolves?