Ukraine may accidentally help Russian agents spy on them

kyiv—The entire world has witnessed the impact of Russia brutal military attack against Ukraine But another, more insidious attack has gone virtually unnoticed outside the country: an expanding network of russian agents It is believed to be embedded in all aspects of Ukrainian life, from parliament to television networks.

The former governor of Donetsk told The Daily Beast that president zelensky is not doing enough to remove pro-Russian political figures and fears that new efforts to boost and streamline intelligence gathering could lead to even more damaging penetration by Russia.

“kyiv was glowing with the phosphor marks that someone put on Russian helicopters during the first days of the war,” said Serhiy Taruta, who is now a lawmaker. He fears that current Russian espionage is more subtle but just as dangerous.

Another lawmaker was arrested on suspicion of treason by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in September. During a raid on Nestor Shufrych’s property, The SBU said it found a haul of pro-Kremlin memorabilia.. It allegedly had display cases filled with dozens of ancient weapons from the Russian Empire and Soviet times, as well as military uniforms and Russian patriotic symbols, which have been banned in Ukraine.

Shufrych, who also owned a television channel, was allegedly accused of being a spokesman for President Putin as well as working for a suspected spymaster, who until recently was former deputy secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine. Vladimir Sivkovich was inside the inner sanctum of Ukrainian security when the war broke out.

He The United States sanctioned Sivkovich last yearclaiming he had ties to the FSB and “worked with a network of Russian intelligence actors to carry out influence operations,” including efforts to convince Kiev to cede Crimea to Russia, as well as infamous efforts from within Ukraine to influence the 2020 US presidential election in favor of then-President Donald Trump.

According The Sivkovich State Bureau of Investigation had been working with the FSB to create a spy network in Ukraine.

The Daily Beast spoke to politicians, businessmen, security experts and military veterans about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to cleanse Kiev’s establishment of corruption and Moscow’s influence agents, a persistent and stifling problem that is often compared with the tentacles of a giant octopus.

Since the first days of the battle for Kiev, Ukrainian intelligence has been catching Russian spies, including members of the Ukrainian security services accused of collecting and passing secret state information to Russian representatives and trying to influence Russian decisions. personnel in Kiev’s security agencies. Ukraine. One of those arrested on suspicion of treason was Oleh Kulinich, head of the Crimean directorate of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU); He was arrested in July 2022 on suspicion of recruiting Russian-friendly agents under orders from Moscow.

A military counterintelligence official working on the Ukraine war reportedly said news week: “We have managed to identify Russian spies within the Ukrainian government and military, and at various other points in the supply chain.”

Yurii Butusov, editor-in-chief of Censor.net, one of the independent media outlets conducting investigations into endemic corruption and espionage in kyiv, said: “The network of Russian agents is large; Before the war we had the whole group of them. .”

The Opposition Platform for Life, sponsored by Putin’s close friend and adviser Victor Medvechuk, held 44 of the 450 seats in parliament as of last year.

Butusov said the mainstream media is full of spies and people with ties to pro-Putin Russian media. “There are a mass of agents with their own people in the television media,” he told The Daily Beast.

The channels that belonged to Putin’s supposed puppets Shufrych, Medvechuk and Yevhen Muraiev, who he did an interview with The Daily Beast when Britain named him a Russian agent last year.—still had licenses in May of this year. Worse yet, “United News,” a continuous 24/7 news broadcast shown on every network since the war began, is put together by a unified team of television producers that includes to the same people who were used to spread pro-Russian propaganda. in the networks of Medvechuk and Muraiev.

Anti-corruption fighters agree that Ukraine has a long way to go before all the tentacles connecting the Kiev authorities to the Kremlin are cut. The head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, Daria Kaleniuk, refused to attend the Yalta European Strategy Forum, where Zelensky and his first lady were among the speakers, because it was sponsored by the Pinchuk Foundation, run by Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian. oligarch and media mogul. “Oligarchs and their money laundering would never buy the loyalty of Ukraine’s civil society,” he said.

Kaleniuk fears Russia’s influence even at the highest levels of power, referring to Persistent claims in kyiv that Zelensky’s own chief of staff has a cozy relationship with Moscow. “We have many questions about Russia’s ties with high-level public officials, including Andrii Yermak, the head of the presidential office,” she said.

Ukrainian-born U.S. Congresswoman Victoria Spartz (R-IN) wrote to President Biden last year raising a series of questions about Yermak’s record, including the accusation that he leaked intelligence to Russia through Belarus. As Zelensky’s chief of staff, it has been suggested that Yermak is the second most powerful man in Ukraine.

Taruta, who was governor of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine until 2014, said the leader’s office was still very happy to work alongside Members of Parliament (MPs) who had a long pro-Russian track record.

“Our society today sees the entire opposition bloc of deputies who visited Putin and tried to play along as pro-Russian figures. But our leadership actively cooperates with these parliamentarians when it comes to voting and when they say that there is no mechanism to deprive these pro-Russian parliamentarians of their mandates, that is simply hypocrisy,” he told The Daily Beast.

“Shufrych (who was arrested last month) was a close friend of Medvechuk and has until now chaired a parliamentary committee, like many others who hold senior positions today.”

Taruta sees even greater danger on the horizon with new legislation proposed in parliament to grant enormous powers to the State Special Communications and Information Protection Service to access and control cybersecurity for public and private institutions in Ukraine. The bill echoes the extensive Internet control given to the FSB in Russia.

“Any effort to concentrate all power in a single institution is dangerous,” he said. “The concentration of power in one pair of hands without control by democratic institutions could result in someone’s efforts for totalitarian control of the information space.”

Ivan Pietukhov, president of Adamant, one of Ukraine’s oldest internet and telecommunications companies, went even further, telling The Daily Beast that the new law may have been deliberately designed to be corrupted and misused by Russian agents who They operate in Ukraine.

“I am not sure if the author of the bill is an agent, but the network of agents is large, I personally demand that legislators from pro-Russian parties be investigated,” said Pietukhov, who is also vice-president of the League of Industrialists. and Entrepreneurs.

“There must be a circle of people who copy even the ideas of the Russian Federal Security Service,” he said. “This is exactly Russia’s approach to building the evil empire: the FSB is an agency that controls information and cybersecurity in Russia, while in the United States and the European Union control is shared between several institutions.”

The head of Ukraine’s bar association, Oleg Chernobai, told The Daily Beast that so much power should not be given to one government department. “If that bill passes, the service will have access to confidential client data of defense attorneys. According to that bill, a single agency would accumulate all the functions, that is wrong,” he stated.

As Zelensky tries to kill the Russian octopus strangling Ukraine, he may inadvertently be helping its tentacles grow.