So the plain shape of it is this: a serving officer of a state intelligence service financed and helped carry out the execution of the only witness to a bombing in a European city. The claim is that a man trained by the state to kill quietly did precisely that – using the state’s tradecraft, financed through his own accounts – and that the vast institution built on hierarchy, tasking and deniability knew nothing of it. The prosecutor general who took office in mid-2025, Ruslan Kravchenko, shut twenty-five centres in Dnipro alone the following month; in December a Eurojust-coordinated operation dismantled a network spanning Kyiv, Dnipro and Ivano-Frankivsk that had defrauded more than four hundred European victims of over ten million euros.