By Larry C. Johnson
Sonar21
August 14, 2025
Let's start with a very interesting post from Joe Tuzara's Substack. I don't know if this is true because I have not found any other media source reporting on it, and there are some problems with the details reported. Here is the claim:
White Hats on Sunday killed a Ukrainian assassin in Wasilla, Alaska, five days before President Trump is scheduled to meet with Vladimir Putin at a currently undisclosed venue in The Last Frontier.
At approximately 10:00 p.m., soldiers from the 10th Special Forces Group stormed a bungalow on Front Street, near Lake Lucille, and shot dead 42-year-old Stefan Orestovych, a resident of Kyiv and former employee of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense.
He was also a trained sniper, having spent a decade with the Ukrainian army's Special Operations Forces. US Special Forces had to kill him, a White Hat source told Real Raw News, for he had pulled a pistol on them as they charged through the doorway.
After neutralizing the threat, the soldiers found two Sig P229 pistols, a scoped and suppressor-fitted Daniel Defense DDM4 AR-style rifle, and the expertly forged passport that Orestovych had used to enter the US via Anchorage.
This is an entertaining story, but I have my doubts about its veracity. I have the Daniel Defense DDM4 rifle - it is chambered for 5.56×45mm NATO - and it is not a cheap firearm, nor is it commonly stocked in gun stores. How did he get his hands on that rifle? It is not a sniper rifle. With a first-class optic - again, not cheap - a trained shooter can hit a target with accuracy out to 300 yards. How did a Ukrainian citizen arrive in Alaska, pick up a DDM4, and obtain an expensive optic and silencer? Even if he brought the optic and silencer with him to the US there is an additional question: How did he get those through customs? Once he was in place in Alaska, he still needed to find a gun range where he could zero the rifle. You don't just slap the optic on the rifle without firing shots at a target to make sure the bullet is hitting where you are aiming.
I also am skeptical that such a mission - since it was not time critical - would be given to some 10th Special Forces soldiers. Don't get me wrong. Those guys are skilled soldiers, but they are not trained for this kind of mission. The Secret Service has a SWAT team capable of carrying out the mission or, alternatively, FBI's HRT could have been dispatched. Let's just say I have my doubts about this.
A more realistic tactic to disrupt the Summit comes from a Russian Telegram channel, and was posted on Andrei Martyanov's blog:
❗️❗️❗️❗️Kiev is preparing a provocation to disrupt the negotiations scheduled for August 15 between Putin and Trump, warned the Russian Ministry of Defense. According to available data, on Friday the Armed Forces of Ukraine have planned a provocative strike using UAVs and missiles on one of the densely populated residential areas or a hospital in the Kharkiv region. The consequences are to be "documented" by Western journalists brought in. For this purpose, a group of foreign media journalists was delivered to the city of Chuhuiv the day before under the pretext of "preparing a series of reports about the residents of the city in the frontline zone." The Kiev regime plans to place all responsibility for the strike on the Russian Armed Forces to create a negative media background and conditions for disrupting the negotiations. Provocations are also possible in other settlements controlled by the Kiev regime, - added the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Maybe this is just a piece of information warfare, i.e. propaganda. We will just have to wait-and-see.
This article was originally published on Sonar21.