State TV Guest Boasts Russia Could Easily Murder Zelensky Anytime It Wants

A Kremlin propagandist has said on state television that if Russia had wanted to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it would have already done so.

Andrey Gurulyov, a Russian parliament member and former military commander, made the comments during a discussion on the Russia-1 program 60 Minutes about a story in the upcoming book The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House, written by journalist Chris Whipple.

The book said that before Russia invaded Ukraine last February, CIA Director Bill Burns traveled to Kyiv to inform Zelensky of a Russian plan to assassinate him. When the Ukrainian president was given "precise details of the Russian plots...he was taken aback, sobered by this news," the book said, according to an excerpt published by The Independent.

Ukrainian officials have said that Zelensky has survived more than 12 separate attempts on his life by Russian forces since the start of the war. Whipple wrote that U.S. intelligence tipoffs helped thwart two of those tries.

In front of a screen that showed the excerpt from The Independent, anchor Olga Skabaeeva asked Gurulyov for his take on the Whipple book's story.

"If a nail had to be hammered into Zelensky's coffin, it would have been done a long time ago, I assure you," he said during Tuesday's program on Russia-1, a state TV channel. "No such goal or objective was set. That is why Zelensky is alive at this stage."

"And the CIA can tell tales to whoever they like and as long as they like. It's for losers," he said.

The clip was tweeted by Ukrainian internal affairs adviser Anton Gerashchenko. Paraphrasing Gurulyov's comments, he wrote, "If we really wanted to murder Zelensky, we would have done so a long time ago."

Newsweek has contacted Ukraine's Foreign Ministry for comment.

Gurulyov was deputy commander of the Southern Military District between 2016 and 2019 and has made incendiary comments on the Russia-1 program.

He has called for nuclear strikes on Western countries that support Ukraine. In September, he warned that Russia could turn the U.K. into a "Martian desert" in response to its military backing of Ukraine.

Russia-1's 60 Minutes is a news and politics talk show in which guests routinely issue threats against Western nations, Ukraine and Zelensky. Russian parliament member and former spy Andrei Lugovoi told the program in November that Zelensky "and his circle should be the first to climb onto the gallows" and that "we have to chase them all over the world."

Lugovoi is wanted by British police in the 2006 killing of former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London.