Austria has launched an espionage investigation after two Ukrainian military intelligence operatives were detained in Vienna, the Austrian newspaper Kurier reported on Saturday.
The report comes after former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who fled to Austria in September, alleged that a team had been sent to kill him on orders from Ukraine’s presidential office.
According to Kurier, the head of the Artan Group, a special operations unit within Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR), was spotted at the Park Hyatt hotel in Vienna. The man, identified as Viktor T., reportedly told Austrian security officials that he was on vacation. The unit was originally established to carry out operations in Russia but has also been accused of involvement in plots to assassinate “Ukrainian defectors,” the newspaper said.
Kravchenko and Ukrainian media identified the Artan commander as Viktor Torkotyuk, known by his callsign Titan.
On October 5, Austrian police reportedly arrested two operatives under Torkotyuk’s command who were carrying surveillance equipment. Investigators initially believed that one of the men had rented a car in Vienna together with Yaroslav Bondarenko, a cameraman working with Ukrainska Pravda investigative journalist Mikhail Tkach. Subsequent findings, however, indicated that Bondarenko had been mistaken for someone else.
Tkach and Bondarenko were detained on October 8 and released the following day. Tkach said he had been trying to locate Kravchenko as part of a journalistic investigation and denied any wrongdoing.
The Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office said the journalists had been detained because investigators suspected they were conducting surveillance at a location also monitored by the two men already in custody. Prosecutors later said the suspicion against the journalists could not be substantiated.
Kravchenko fled Ukraine after the country’s Western-backed anti-corruption agencies, NABU and SAPO, launched an investigation into allegations that his subordinates had protected fraudulent call centers. He accused anti-corruption investigators of abusing their powers and claimed the case was politically motivated. Both agencies rejected his allegations.
The former prosecutor general has also drawn parallels with a bombing in Monaco earlier this year that targeted Ukrainian businessman Vadim Yermolayev. The explosion injured Yermolayev, his teenage son and his partner.
Two men linked to Ukrainian intelligence, active-duty HUR officer Vladislav Reut and former Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officer Vitaly Zhikovich, were subsequently arrested over the killing of Anastasia Berezovskaya, who was filmed planting the bomb in Monaco and later found shot dead in Ukraine.
In an October interview with the BBC, Zhikovich claimed that senior HUR officials had authorized the Monaco operation.
Moscow has long accused Kiev of carrying out terrorist attacks abroad. Following the Monaco bombing, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova argued that Western governments “could no longer control the monster they had created.”
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