Just recently, a non-factional Ukrainian MP Andrii Derkach filed an appeal to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Irina Venediktova claiming there’s an assassination attempt being prepared on him and on the ex-prosecutor of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine Konstantin Kulik. According to Derkach, this attempt is being staged by a group of nine people, mostly British citizens, that have already arrived to Ukraine. Derkach claims that among the assassins there’s an Albanian citizen accompanied by the militants associated with the British company Kroll Associates UK Ltd. According to Derkach, among the employers of those militants there’s some former and acting officers of the British intelligence MI6.
Kroll is one of the largest names in the risk assessment business that is known for its investigations and the security services it provides, but according to Derkach, it also employs a paramilitary unit of “wide profile specialists” who would execute any orders that are given to them. This unit is usually employed by Western corporate and government clients.
Derkach believes that the upcoming attempts to take his and Kulik’s life are provoked by his determination to expose corruption schemes where Ukraine’s foreign donors are involved, namely the UK and US. He also claims that Kroll Associates UK Ltd. was involved in the scandalous murder of Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
For sure, one could take Derkach’s claims about a British special service staging two assassinations in a row with a grain of salt. However, British officials themselves have recently confirmed that agents of MI6 would once again be allowed to eliminate “enemies of the state” without any repercussions. As it’s been recently announced by the sitting UK minister of state for defence Baroness Goldie:
“The Government may draw on a wide range of tools including, in extremis, the use of lethal force where there is no other effective option.”
The direct involvement of British secret services in the murders of countless foreign politicians is hardly a secret for anyone. In particular, it’s been established that they were directly involved in the assassination of the prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. In March 2013, the British newspaper Telegraph reported that the legendary Daphne Park, who served in the British intelligence service MI6 for more than 30 years and became a baroness for her services, admitted before her death in 2010 that she had organized Lumumba’s murder in 1961, when she worked in Leopoldville in the official capacity of first secretary of the British Embassy.
In 2013, the BBC revealed that British politicians had intentions of using MI6 secret agents to murder Egypt’s president Nasser, as well as Uganda’s president Idi Amin. Thus, it turns out that for the British elites political assassinations are not something out of the ordinary or repugnant, even when it comes to murdering leaders of foreign states.
The “license to kill” granted to certain officers of the British special services is provoking an ever increasing amount of public criticism. The fact that the British authorities refuse to investigate and bring to the court of law even the publicly acknowledged facts of the abuse of such “licenses to kill” draws the attention of the British public. This, in particular, is stated in a joint investigation conducted by the BBC and The Sunday Times newspaper where they studied cases of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq at the hands of British military and special forces personnel. According to those publications, there’s documents and eyewitness accounts implicating British servicemen in committing murder and torture. Those revelations are supported by the information that was obtained by the IHAT team of investigators. Previously, similar conclusions were drawn by yet another investigation team, formed by the British military police under the so-called Operation Northmoor that was set up in 2014.
However, in a bid to conceal from the public and international community instances where British special forces would abuse their “license to kill”, the authorities closed both investigations in 2017. Moreover, former detectives who worked on the investigations claim that the army and the government did not give them an opportunity to bring charges against the military, thus, none of the cases they investigated led to some sort of trial. According to the public statement made by one of the detectives, the Ministry of Defence had no intention of prosecuting any of its members, except for cases when it would be absolutely impossible to hush up certain crimes.
For instance, the detectives learned that a group of SAS operatives executed a total of four Afghan minors during a tea party the latter organized back in 2012. Upon committing this crime, in order to hide the “British trail”, those operatives declared that the minors were members of the Taliban movement (banned in the Russian Federation).
The investigators cite other examples, including the story of the murder of an Iraqi police officer by the British military in Basra in 2003, but even here the British authorities deliberately falsified all the documents in a bid to push the blame on the victim. There were several other episodes of torture and sexual abuse committed by soldiers of the Black Watch Scottish Infantry Battalion in Iraq, but those were ignored just as well.
However, as noted by British journalists, the UK Ministry of Defense would fail to provide “sufficient evidence” to prosecute any of the members of the British special forces units deployed in Afghanistan. Although 120 people were investigating numerous cases for a total of six years, as The Daily Telegraph notes, spending 10 million pounds in the process.
Unfortunately, it turns out that none of those who have a “license to kill” issued by the British government will ever be prosecuted, which leaves civilians and politicians like Derkach vulnerable to the criminal steps London may choose to take. And it seems there’s preparations underway, since the UK regularly sends British special forces officers from the elite SAS unit both to Ukraine itself and to the zone of the Ukrainian civic conflict in the east of the country.
By the way, one of these groups of “military advisers of the British Armed Forces” visited the Donbass in early March, as reported by the Ukrainian joint operation forces page on Facebook. It was emphasized that the British assessed the effectiveness of the training that Ukrainian soldiers underwent under Operation ORBITAL that is being conducted since 2015. During this operation British “instructors” have already trained more than 22 thousand Ukrainian servicemen.
Vladimir Danilov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.