On the eve of the invasion: the State Security Service of Ukraine intercepted a message to Kadyrov about the attack on Kyiv, – The Guardian

The intercepted message to Kadyrov signaled the approaching offensive on Kyiv.

Ukrainian border guards intercepted an important message from the commander of a Chechen unit stationed in Belarus to Ramzan Kadyrov in the second week of February. In it, the commander reported that his unit was already in place and would soon be in Kyiv, The Guardian reports.

However, this signal did not convince Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of the inevitability of a full-scale invasion. According to the publication’s sources, the Ukrainian leader was guided by the assessments of his closest advisor Andriy Yermak.

According to informed interlocutors, most of the high command, including the then Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny, were only preparing scenarios for a possible attack, but without a sanction from above, any large-scale troop movements remained on paper.

Yermak convinced the president that Russia’s troop buildup was an element of hybrid pressure and would not escalate into a large-scale invasion. This position effectively stopped the Ukrainian side from taking a preventive response, even though intelligence was providing specific signals of a threat.

“Yermak was one of the few Ukrainian officials who was in regular contact with his Russian counterparts. He often spoke with Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Dmitry Kozak, as part of the protracted negotiations over Donbas that reached a dead end. If Kozak helped assure Yermak that the panic about a Russian invasion was absurd, then most likely he believed so himself,” the publication writes.

According to sources, even in the Kremlin, most senior officials were unaware of the details of Putin’s plans, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

(C)UNIAN 2026