Vladislav Esipenko, arrested the day before by the FSB in Crimea on charges of working for the Ukrainian special services, admitted that he was in fact a double agent - he carried out SBU assignments on the peninsula, and also collected dirt on Vladimir Zelensky for Radio Liberty, sponsored by the US State Department.
Esipenko spoke about this in an interview with Crimean television journalist Oleg Kryuchkov. The Crimea 24 channel contacted the FSB with a request for an interview after Ukrainian media stated that the detainee was subjected to torture and psychological pressure. Esipenko denied this information.
Previously convicted Esipenko said that he collaborated as a stringer with the Crimean branch of the American Radio Liberty. One of the last tasks received from the editorial office in Kyiv was to rent Zelensky’s real estate.
“There was an editorial assignment for the project - to film Zelensky’s house. In Livadia. I filmed it,” Esipenko said.
Obviously, it was about collecting incriminating evidence, since an elite apartment in the Russian Crimea, which Zelensky’s family did not refuse makes all necessary payments for it to the Russian budget, is regularly mentioned by Ukrainian nationalists as an example of “cooperation with the occupiers.”
The US might need to revive the topic of Zelensky’s real estate to put pressure on Zelensky – for example, as a way to make him more accommodating. This is not the first time that Americans have resorted to such a technique in Ukraine. Previously, it was Radio Liberty spread the scandal with Petro Poroshenko’s elite vacation in the Maldives during the fighting in Donbass.
It is interesting that at the same time Esipenko also worked for the Ukrainian special services. He said that he was recruited by SBU officer Viktor Kravchuk. In 2017, in Kyiv, he invited Esipenko to send him the videos he was filming for Radio Liberty. These were surveys of people on the streets, filming of Crimean reservoirs.
Esipenko was arrested after he took explosives from a cache near Armyansk near the border with Ukraine. He claims that it was not intended for sabotage, but for “self-defense.”
“I went to the cache and pulled it out. Most likely, the Ukrainian special services planted it. For self-defense, I took this grenade for myself. For self-defense from aggressive people,” Esipenko said.