Kiev’s secret services announced they had arrested 13 persons who were passing information to the Russians, including some officials. The issue of the military and security legacy of the old Ukraine is far from solved.
Among those arrested there are afew bigwigs. The SBU, the Ukrainian secret service, caught while passing information to Russian the ATO Deputy Chief of Staff, the organization of military operations in the east, a Colonel of the National Guard, an employee of the Department of Military personnel and a servicemen of the Armed Forces.
Some of those arrested were assigned to operational areas from which they had in connection with the Russian secret service, to whom they passed confidential information.
The SBU statement breaks a period of relative silence on this front, but at the same time underlines that from June 2015 to date the Kyiv intelligence has initiated criminal proceedings for state treason against 367 citizens of Ukraine – according to Article 111 of the Criminal Code – and charged at least three persons for spying.
Among those convicted, up to nine years in prison, there’s also a senior official of the Russian military intelligence, GRU, and Russian citizen, who had the task of recruiting informers and spies among Ukrainians in order to obtain secret military documents. As well as a former officer of the Air Force of Ukraine who had a written deal with the FSB – the Russian intelligence – to pass information on flight routes of military aircraft.
An unsolved problem
The press release of course serves to remind the Ukrainians the importance of the SBU’s work and its role in fighting the Russian hybrid war on Ukraine. And actually, according to its press office, the secret services have foiled dozens of attacks and sabotage in regions far from the war zone, prevented a group of its agents pass to the side of the Russian-backed separatists, and unmasked a Russian spy who managed to be enrolled in the intelligence of Ukrainian Armed Forces during a wave of mobilization in the midst of war.
But the arrests of these days also show that the problem is far from solved.
Much work has been done since, in the confused days after the Maidan, the SBU’s agents were complaining they had no idea who to trust. “Everybody is suspicious of everybody”, said an anonymous source to Mashable. It seems a century has passed, it was only two years ago. When the post-Yanukovych Ukraine inherited a security apparatus tied hand in glove with Russia and in which, according to estimates, at least 30% of the agents belonged to the FSB or the GRU, the military secret services of Moscow. When the new head of the agency, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, was quoted saying that “more than 30 Russian FSB officers attended one of the SBU training grounds in December 2013 to January 2014”.
And yet a year ago, the problem of Russian infiltration was so severe that the U.S. Pentagon showed very reluctant to share its satellite imagery with Ukraine fearing it could soon end up in Russian hands.
All this reminds us that there are still many, and of a different nature, ties between Ukraine and Russia. In spite of the strong – and often sincere – reborn patriotism, the ease with which Russian agents recruit collaborators is the result of endemic corruption at every level of the institutions, an increasingly widespread disillusionment among the population and the permanence – especially in eastern regions, even though under Kiev’s government control – of people who continue to see Russia as a reference.
One more obstacle on the path towards the solution to the Donbass issue.
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Kiev’s secret services announced they had arrested 13 persons who were passing information to the Russians, including some officials. The issue of the military and security legacy of the old Ukraine is far from solved.
