Ukraine faked the death of Denis Kapustin, a Russian commander fighting for Ukraine, to trick Russia into paying a bounty of $500,000 and identify Russian agents plotting his assassination, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has said.
In an intelligence coup, Ukraine on Thursday announced it had faked the death of Denis Kapustin, one of the most prominent Russian commanders fighting against President Vladimir Putin in the ongoing war, and tricked Russia into paying a $500,000 bounty for an assassination that never happened.
In a video shared on New Year’s Day, Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, head of the military intelligence agency GUR, appeared beside Kapustin and revealed the deception was part of an operation to foil an assassination plot.
Budanov said Kapustin’s killing was “ordered by the special services of the aggressor state Russia, which allocated half a million dollars to carry out the crime”, but his life was saved by GUR’s “comprehensive special operation”, according to The Guardian.
Kapustin founded the pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) in 2022 and joined the Ukrainian side to fight the invading Russian forces. He and the RDK have been involved in some of the most audacious missions against Russia, including incursions and raids into Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions.
Kapustin, better known by his nom de guerre ‘White Rex’, has long been hunted by Russian agencies for his opposition to Putin and his government.
How Ukraine outsmarted Russia
As part of the operation, Kapustin’s military unit, RDK, announced on December 27 that he had been killed in a drone strike on the southern frontier. After Russian agencies believed the news, they paid a $500,000 bounty to the group they thought had killed Kapustin.
But the bounty was received by GUR’s special ‘Timur unit’ that orchestrated the deception.
Budanov said GUR’s operation foiled Russia’s plot to assassinate Kapustin and identified Russian agents, including the “masterminds within the Russian special services and the perpetrators” involved in the plot.
In GUR’s video, a masked commander of the Timur unit said, “Our side also received a corresponding amount of funds allocated by Russian intelligence agencies for the implementation of this crime.”
Kapustin had set up the RDK to overthrow Putin and bring “peace to Russia” with the stated objective of ending Putin’s regime of “lies, corruption, and lawlessness”, according to The Telegraph.
The RDK includes former personnel from Russia’s Wagner Group, FSB, and civilian volunteers.
In Russia, authorities have declared the RDK a terrorist organisation, and courts have twice sentenced Kapustin to life imprisonment after convicting him of treason and terrorism in trials held in absentia, as per The Telegraph.
Even as Kapustin has fought under the broader Ukrainian war effort, his association with far-right extremism and previous football hooliganism, as well as the neo-Nazi views of some personnel under his command, have complicated relations with Ukrainian authorities. In 2024, when the RDK mounted incursions into Russia, Ukrainian officials initially said the operation did not have formal authorisation.
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