"For more than 4-6 hours we sailed with grenades in our hands": new details of the raid to Crimea, led by Budanov in 2016, have become known

Soldiers from the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine who raided the temporarily occupied Crimea in 2016 sailed across the sea with grenades in their hands for six hours. They had agreed in advance that they would not fall into enemy hands alive.

The group realized that if they were captured, they would be tortured and killed by the aggressor country. Lieutenant General Valerii Kondratiuk, former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine and former head of the DIU, told the details of this special operation in a commentary to Channel 24.

The group that reached Crimea was led by the current head of Ukrainian intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov.

According to Kondratiuk, the soldiers showed "unprecedented courage".

"They agreed among themselves that no one would be captured alive. Even when they were returning to the swim across the strait, they swam for more than four to six hours with grenades in their hands. If someone had tried to get these guys out of the water, no one would have reached them alive. This is unprecedented courage and dedication of the DIU and the Ukrainian people," he emphasized.

Kondratiuk said that the Kremlin was shocked by the raid. At the time, Moscow was confident that it controlled Ukraine's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

"They realized how fast the dynamics are changing, how much we managed to Ukrainize the Ukrainian intelligence services in a short time. I consider this to be one of the main results that we had at that time," he added.

The former DIU chief said that at the time he received information that Russia was deploying a large number of helicopters at the Dzhankoy airfield. The worst outcome of this could be Russia's preparation of a low-altitude landing operation when our air defense would not be able to detect and hit the helicopters, landing and seizing the territory.

As OBOZ.UA previously reported, Budanov previously spoke about a series of reconnaissance landings in Crimea in 2016. He participated in some of them himself. After one of the landings, which was carried out to "transfer cargo deep into the territory," Budanov assures, the scouts left by swimming across the Syvash, which was about 8 km away.

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