The wife of Ukraine’s military intelligence chief has been poisoned and is recovering in a hospital, Ukrainian intelligence officials said Tuesday, an incident that has led to widespread speculation that Russia was stepping up efforts to attack Ukraine’s senior leadership.

Andriy Chernyak, a Ukrainian military intelligence official, said Marianna Budanova had been poisoned and was being treated. Her husband, Kyrylo Budanov, is the head of the organization known as GUR and is one of the country’s top military leaders.

Mr Chernyak declined to speculate on the perpetrator or the type of poison used and provided no further details, citing the ongoing investigation.

Agency spokesman Andriy Yusov later issued a statement with a similar account of the incident and said more information would be released as the investigation continues.

Ms Budanova’s suspected poisoning was first reported by Ukrainian news channel Babel. It said doctors found a large amount of heavy metals in Ms. Budanova’s system that “are not used in any way in everyday life and military affairs.”

Mr. Budanov had not fallen ill, Ukrainian officials said.

Reports that Ms. Budanova had been poisoned led to immediate suspicion in Ukraine that Russia, which has a long history of using poison as a tool to exact revenge and eliminate perceived enemies, may have been responsible.

Mr. Budanov has often stated that Russia intended to kill him, and an intelligence spokesman, Andriy Yusov, said this summer that Russia had made at least 10 attempts to do so.

The circumstances of the poisoning and how Ms. Budanova was affected were not immediately clear. But Mr Budanov told Radio Liberty earlier this year that since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, his wife, a psychologist who worked as an anti-corruption adviser to Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko, had effectively moved into her husband’s home . office.

If Russia were able to poison Ms. Budanov, it would indicate that its agents were operating closer to the inner circles of power in Kiev than previously thought possible.

Viktor Yahun, former deputy head of the Domestic Intelligence Service, Ukraine’s security service, has taken part in previous investigations into poisonings and said more information was needed before it would be possible to assess the Budanova case.

But Mr Yahun said he would be surprised if Russia had agents in Ukraine who could get close to Ms Budanova or her husband.

“There are simply not the necessary agents on the territory of Ukraine who can poison someone,” he said.

However, Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview before the poisoning was announced that Russia was activating sleeper agents and stepping up efforts to destabilize the government in Kiev.

“In 2003, Putin set himself the task of destroying our country, and all this time their tasks have not changed,” he said. “Given that the Russian Federation is unable to win by military means, it is now using all its agent networks, which unfortunately still exist. And now we observe their maximum activation.”

According to Ukrainian officials, Russia has in the past targeted senior Ukrainian leaders, including President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mr. Zelensky has said he is no longer shocked when he hears about new conspiracies in his life.

“The first one is very interesting,” he said in one recent interview with The Sun, the British tabloid, “and then it’s like Covid.”

Eighty-nine schoolgirls and their teachers in northern Afghanistan were hospitalized this weekend with respiratory and neurological symptoms.

On Saturday, 63 students and staff at Kabod Aab School — an elementary school for girls in northern Sar-i-Pul province — fell ill shortly after arriving in their classrooms that morning, officials and parents of those students said.

The next day, 26 more students along with staff members from the nearby Faiz Abad Girls’ School fell ill and reported similar symptoms.

The suggestion that someone had tried to poison schoolgirls shocked young girls and their parents in this region of Afghanistan, where restrictions on education have become a focal point since the Taliban seized power in 2021 and are symbolic of the government’s policy towards women that effectively got them out of the way. public life.

Local Afghan officials said they believed the poisonings were motivated by local animosities between villages. Several local elders and residents were skeptical of that claim.

Girls are not allowed to go to school above sixth grade in Afghanistan, but they are allowed to go to primary schools, so most of the girls who got sick were 6 to 12 years old.

The students and staff were hospitalized with shortness of breath, weakness, nausea and headaches, and many were put on ventilators, their relatives said. About half of them had been fired by Monday, according to local officials.

“Unknown people spread toxic substances in the classrooms, and when the students entered the classrooms, they experienced shortness of breath, watery eyes and nose, and lost consciousness,” said Umair Sarpuli, the director of culture and information in the province.

Security and intelligence agencies were still searching for the perpetrators, local officials said, at a time of uncertainty for girls across Afghanistan.

In March last year, the Taliban government banned girls from attending secondary schools and in November, it banned women from going to university. Women have been too forbidden to go to many public places such as gyms and parks, travel a considerable distance without a male relative and working in most areas beyond the private sector and healthcare.

The government policies to roll back women’s rights have come to define how Western countries view the Taliban, diplomats and observers say, and have drawn near-universal condemnation, including from Islamist governments such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The problems at the two schools were first reported around 8 a.m. Saturday, parents and local elders said. Shortly after the teachers started their daily lessons at Kabod Aab School, two children started having convulsions and struggled to breathe.

The school principal sent the two children home, thinking they had the common flu. But within 20 minutes, dozens of students began showing similar symptoms and were taken by car to a local clinic.

Qasim Qurban, 38, a farmer in the district, was working in his field when a neighbor ran over and told him his daughters had fallen ill, he said. He went to the local clinic and found his 10-year-old daughter, Sabera, and 13-year-old daughter, Hadia, struggling with labored breathing. The two girls were then transferred to the provincial hospital.

“Every half hour or every hour they would have shortness of breath and then they would be put on a ventilator,” he said.

The next day, dozens of other Faiz Abad Girls’ School students fell ill with similar symptoms, officials said.

For more than a decade, Afghanistan had experienced sporadic incidents of suspected poisonings in girls’ schools across the country. Under the previous Western-backed government, officials often blamed the Taliban for the attacks – a claim the Taliban denied at the time.

In 2012, nearly 300 schoolgirls in northern Takhar province fell ill. A year later, about 200 schoolgirls fell ill in a similar incident in the capital Kabul. In another major incident in 2016, about 600 schoolgirls in northern Afghanistan’s Herat province were targeted by what officials say was poisonous gas.

Earlier this year, similar incidents then received attention in neighboring Iran hundreds of schoolgirls were hospitalized in what Iranian officials say may have been deliberate poisonings designed to prevent girls from attending school.

The two affected schools remained closed on Monday as security forces conducted their investigations, but across the province, the episodes renewed concern among parents, some of whom were already worried about the safety of their daughters attending primary schools.

Since the Taliban seized power and rolled back women’s rights, many parents worry that those who oppose girls’ education feel empowered to act with impunity — and could carry out attacks on girls’ schools, they say.

“Everyone is scared, and we should be scared, because the poisoning of the students is serious,” said Hassan Haidari, whose daughter is a teacher at Kabod Aab School and was hospitalized on Saturday. On Monday, she was still in serious condition and on a ventilator in the provincial hospital.

“People want to know who did this to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Mr Haidari said. “Otherwise no one will send their daughter to school.”