Chastyakov’s death was likely an assassination by Ukraine’s GRU intel operatives.
When Gennady Chastyakov – the top assistant and personal friend to the Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny – was killed in a ‘gift bomb’ terrorist attack, a peculiar thing happened: there was not, in the MSM, a rush to point the finger at the Russians.
It’s almost as if they knew something that we were not supposed to know.
The attack came in the middle of the rift between Zaluzhny and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. And targeted his third most important military aide, after the two most important had already been sacked.
Authorities from the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs quickly ruled that Chastyakov died in a ‘tragic accident’ while celebrating his 39th birthday.
One may feel inclined to think that any talk of terrorist attack in this case is conspiracy talk, pure speculation. So, let’s compare the different versions.
Valery Zaluzhny: ‘an unidentified explosive device went off in one of the gifts’ presented to Chastyakov.
Ministry of Internal Affairs: ‘Chastyakov himself pulled at the ring of a grenade given to him as a present’.
Let’s agree there are two different explanations, here.
The Ministry concluded ‘with a 99.9% probability’ that it was a ‘tragic accident’, and ruled out any ‘assassination attempt’.
Sputnik reported:
“‘This can’t be an accident’, Alexey Borzenko, a military expert and deputy chief editor of the Literary Russia newspaper, suggested while speaking to Sputnik. ‘Why? Well, first of all, a military serviceman saw a grenade as a gift. There are still five seconds left to take this grenade and throw it through the window. And in this very case an explosion occurred immediately. This means that the grenade was without the moderator. Without these five seconds. Such grenades [without moderators] are usually installed on tripwires in combat zones’.”
If you take the context of the attack, and also the modus operandi of the ‘gift bomb’, it stands clear that the most probable explanation is a terrorist attack by Kyrylo Budanov and his thugs at the Ukrainian GRU (Main Directorate of Intelligence).
Zaluzhny wants to change tactics and prepare a stauch defense, rather than continue to lose men and equipment like there’s no tomorrow.
“On November 1, a British magazine published an extensive interview with the Ukrainian top military commander, who stated bluntly: ‘There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough’. The Ukrainian Presidential Office immediately subjected Zaluzhny to harsh criticism over the ‘stalemate’ remarks. On November 6, a grenade blast killed the Ukrainian top commander’s close aide.
‘The conflict between Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi is a long-standing one, because they have different views on the course of the conflict’, said Borzenko. ‘On the one hand, there is Zelensky, who did not even serve in the army and does not understand all the intricacies of combat operations and who needs a purely political result. And on the other hand, there is Zaluzhnyi who understands all the difficulties. Naturally, Zelensky is looking at the possibility of forming some kind of opposition force within the Ministry of Defense. And if some important people appear supporting Zaluzhny, then they can simply be ’removed’’, the military expert assumed. ‘This does not allow Zaluzhny to form a powerful core within the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine’.”
Before Chastyakov died, he was Zaluzhny’s third closest subordinate.
The other two were commander of the territorial defense forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Igor Tantsyura, and commander of the forces of special military operations Viktor Khorenko, who were both abruptly sacked.
Rather than a coincidence this is most likely a pattern.
There’s also the question of the modus operandi, that’s identical to the used in the terrorist attack against Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.
Tatarsky was killed in April in Saint Petersburg by an bomb hidden in as a ‘bust’ of the blogger.
Budanov has confessed in an interview that Ukrainian intelligence is involved in terrorist attacks against Russian public and media figures. Have they now gone after settling scores against supposed dissidents?
“Another similarity is that the explosives in both cases were disguised as a gift that killed a person, the expert pointed out. This apparently suggests that one force could have been behind both assassinations, according to him. ‘So I say again that it is possible that Budanov from the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine is at the origins of all this’, the military expert concluded.”
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The post Russian Media: Chastyakov, Assistant and Friend to Kiev’s Military Leader Zaluzhny, Was Killed in a ‘Gift Bomb’ Terrorist Attack by Their Countrymen of the Ukrainian GRU appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.