Colonel Ivan Voronych moments before his assassination, 10 July 2025, Kyiv, Ukraine. Photo: Ukrainska Pravda

The Ukrainian wing of far-right terrorist organisation The Base, which is suspected of having ties to Russia, has claimed involvement in the recent killing of a top-ranking intelligence colonel in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, The Guardian reported on Wednesday.

Last Thursday, Colonel Ivan Voronych was fatally shot five times in Kyiv by an unidentified gunman who fled the scene of the killing in an SUV. On Sunday, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) chief Vasyl Malyuk announced that two Russian FSB agents suspected of assassinating Voronych had been killed in a police raid on their place of residence in Kyiv.

The Base, founded in 2018 by Rinaldo Nazzaro, a former Pentagon contractor suspected of engaging in espionage at the behest of the Kremlin, is a neo-Nazi terrorist group previously implicated in “an assassination plot, mass shootings, and other actions in Europe”, according to The Guardian.

For months, the newspaper reports, The Base has been offering to pay members or voluntary collaborators to conduct “targeted assassinations” or attacks on Ukraine’s “critical infrastructure”, in a similar fashion to the sabotage operations carried out in Europe by Russia’s intelligence services.

In two Telegram posts published last week, White Phoenix, the alleged Ukraine-based arm of The Base, claimed that its “activists” had carried out a “carefully planned” attack on Voronych as a “warning to the regime” of Volodymyr Zelensky.

“The execution of the SBU colonel is not the end, but only the beginning,” one post by the White Phoenix read, adding that it was “proud of [its] comrades” and calling on “all honest Ukrainians” to join them.

Independent media outlet Agentstvo wrote that the Base’s founder Nazzaro lives in St. Petersburg and has been married to a Russian woman since 2012.

In April, The Guardian reported that former members of The Base suspected Nazzaro of having ties to Russian special services, although he has repeatedly denied the allegation, including at one occasion on Russian state TV.

According to The New York Times, Voronych was a senior officer in the Fifth Directorate, an elite SBU unit responsible for killing a top Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, also known as Motorola, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region in 2016.

Additionally, several social media posts by Ukrainian politicians and former intelligence officers suggested on Thursday that Voronych had helped found the SBU’s Alpha Group, which Russian investigative outlet IStories noted is responsible for countering terror attacks, conducting sabotage in other countries, and protecting Ukrainian government officials.