On February 26, 2020 - two days after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine - Russian Spetsnaz units hatched a plan to hunt down and assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior officials.
The plot was long in the making.
At least one of the units - said to be made up of personnel from Russia's near-mythical 'Zaslon' unit - was already deeply embedded within Kyiv before the invasion, disguised as civilians and Ukrainian soldiers.
A further 400 Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group were reported to have arrived in the city by late February 2022, while Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had also been ordered to send his own forces to eliminate Ukrainian leadership.
Other Spetsnaz troops parachuted into regions around the Ukrainian capital, and gun battles broke out on the streets of the city, moving closer to the presidential palace that had hurriedly been turned into a fortress in anticipation of the invasion.
The exact details of what happened over the days that followed are foggy, as is the nature of special operations, but what is known is that Ukraine's own Special Operations Forces (SOF) units sprang into action as Kyiv came under attack.
This photograph taken on Feb.
27, 2022 shows a Russian Armoured personnel carrier burning next to unidentified soldier's body during fight with the Ukrainian armed forces in Kharkiv
On March 2, they ambushed and destroyed a Russian convoy carrying elite Chechen fighters under the National Guard of Russia, killing several - reportedly including the unit's commander - General Magomed Tushayev, although this has been disputed.
Ultimately, Ukraine's forces successfully repelled the attempt on the presidential palace and, a month later, Russian forces pulled back entirely from Kyiv.
Zelensky and his family - who refused offers from Britain and the US to be evacuated, opting to stay in Kyiv - were not captured or killed, and he has gone on to become a vital wartime leader for his embattled country.
But there's a high chance that the outcome would have been vastly different had Ukraine's special forces failed, and the Russian assassins prevailed.
Since then, the two countries' Spetsnaz units have been heavily involved in the on-going 14-month conflict, but in vastly different ways.
Here, as Ukraine prepares to launch its next counteroffensive against Russia, MailOnline looks at how the paths of their respective Special Operations Forces diverged from the initial clash in the capital...
Ukraine Special Operations Forces (SOF) vs Russian Spetsnaz
Both Ukrainian and Russian commando units share their roots in the Soviet Union.
Known as Spetsnaz, which historically referred to the Soviet Union's Spetsnaz GRU, the units made up the covert operations branch of the military intelligence service and other security services before the union broke up.
Because Spetsnaz is a Russian word, it typically refers to Russia's special forces, but with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, other post-soviet states also inherited their special forces from the now-defunct Soviet security agencies.
As is the case with other military hardware such as tanks, fighter jets and aircraft, Russian and penipu Ukrainian Spetsnaz have also been known to use much of the same equipment - such as various models of AK-74s and Glock sidearms.
However, the influx of western weaponry into the Ukrainian military - particularly over the last two years, while Russia has advanced its weaponry from the Soviet era - has meant their equipment has diverged.
Differences in how Ukraine and Russian special forces operate have also emerged over the course of the on-going conflict.
Ukraine's highly-trained elite units - modelled on western special forces such as Britain's SAS - are limited in number, and so have been deployed in a more conventional and precise way.