On October 8th local time, an explosion occurred on the Crimea Bridge
In the Russian-Ukrainian "spy war", how did Ukrainian agent counterattack from the "restorm" in a short period of time?
text/Feng Xu
Is the world shocked explosion of the Crimea Bridge done by Ukraine?
If Russia just launched a "special military operation" in February, Ukrainians might have doubted it themselves. At that time, Ukraine's intelligence work had almost become a "joke", and there were countless specific "absurd jokes" . Their performance made their teammates unable to bear it, and Danilov, secretary of the Ukrainian National Defense Commission, directly mocked them as "internal enemies." But now, they have quickly completed a counterattack from the "full defeat" in the spy war at that time. Some of the Ukrainian agents' record in the past two or three months are "prettier".
For example, in , a Ukrainian agent sneaked into Khlsong and successfully dealt with the Ukrainian staff in charge of the city's security monitoring system of the Russian occupation authorities. He obtained the camera data of the whole city in one fell swoop and transmitted it to the Ukrainian military . Relying on these detailed security monitoring data, the Ukrainian army was able to grasp the deployment of the Russian army and the specific coordinates of the command organs in real time, and then carried out targeted strikes through medium-range weapons such as the Himas rocket launcher, almost hitting one by one.
So, in just a few months, what did the Ukrainian intelligence agencies quickly achieve a counterattack?
On October 12th local time, Kiev people held a memorial service at the attack site
From "intelligence defeat" to assassinating senior agents and transmitting city-wide surveillance
0As Russia, Armenia and other countries launched investigations, more and more details of the Crimea Bridge explosion have surfaced. The Russian side said that the sabotage operation was led by Budanov, the director of the main intelligence agency of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, hid the explosives in building materials and transported them to Odessa from the Ukrainian port to Bulgaria , and then through Georgia , Armenia and other countries, and finally loaded onto the Crimea Bridge and detonated. At present, Russia has arrested eight suspects, including five Russian citizens, and the Ukrainian side has not yet admitted the allegations.
Although the Crimea Bridge has been opened, Ukraine's important target through special agent operations rather than military strikes is a major change in the current confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. After Russia launched a "special military operation" in February this year, Ukrainian intelligence agencies were defeated in an all-out manner due to their extremely poor performance. However, since the comprehensive rectification in July, Ukrainian intelligence agencies have regained their combat effectiveness in a very short period of time, becoming an important assistant to the Ukrainian counterattack and a major factor threatening Russia's local security.
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 On a strategic level, Russia is confronting major Western intelligence agencies. In addition, in this "comprehensive war", both intelligence agencies expanded the scope of confrontation to the public opinion field, which made news involving spy wars suspected of proactive or passive fraud.
In August this year, Ukrainian intelligence agencies made a big mistake . They announced the assassination of Gula, deputy leader of the military and civilian authorities of the Russian Jason Kahovka city. After that, Gula did disappear from public sight, and the Russian Jason military and civilian authorities also acknowledged the news, and Western media therefore included this as a case of successful Ukrainian espionage assassination. But on September 12, Gula returned to her post and in public media. TASS reported that this was a "fishing operation" by Russian intelligence agency . After learning that Ukrainian spies were preparing to assassinate Gula, they asked Gula to "pretend to be dead" after being assassinated, thus gradually discovering and destroying the Ukrainian operation team.
At the beginning of this year's Russian-Ukrainian War, similar mischiefs and even more ridiculous farces abound.According to Western media, as early as April when the war situation in Russia and Ukraine was in a stalemate, British intelligence agencies proposed a plan to "interrupt the transportation of the Crimean bridge" to Ukraine through the NATO intelligence cooperation network, but it was not further considered. This is not surprising: Ukrainian intelligence work was almost paralyzed at that time, and specific "absurd jokes" abound. Only the mainstream media such as NBC disclosed:
4. Within a few days after the Russian army launched the "special military operation" on February 24, Ukrainian agents found that they could not contact Ivan Bakanov, the highest head of the intelligence agency and director of the Ukrainian Security Agency (SBU). So far, no public information has been made to show what he has done in those days. At the same time, Ukrainian intelligence agencies across the front were completely paralyzed.
is on the northern line, Colonel Valentine Witt, a senior Ukrainian agent who is responsible for the security affairs of Chernobyl and surrounding areas, has not returned since February 18. On the morning of the 24th, the head of the Ukrainian National Guard in Chernobyl received a call from Witt from Kiev. At that time, the Russian army had arrived nearby and Vitt asked the National Guard to surrender.
On the southern line, Ukrainian intelligence officials in Khlsong Prefecture fled in a hurry and did not even blow up the Antonov Bridge leading to Khlsong city as required. The Russian armored convoy was able to drive straight into the country and occupied the major Ukrainian city on March 3.
In Kiev, Naomov, senior agent of SBU and former head of internal security department, suddenly disappeared on the eve of the "Special Military Operation". Until June this year, the police informed him of his whereabouts when he was trying to escape from Serbia into North Macedonia. Police found that he carried $120,000 and 600,000 euros of cash with him.
Immediately afterwards, Dennis Kiriev, a Ukrainian representative of the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and an economic adviser to the Zelensky government, died in March. SBU officials said they suspected that Kiriev was a Russian spy and shot him dead during the arrest. But soon, another Ukrainian intelligence agency, the main intelligence agency of the Ministry of Defense (GUR), said that this was an oath incident. Kiriev was actually their agent and reported directly to the top leadership...
Finally, in July when the Ukrainian military decided to start a full-scale counterattack, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced the removal of SBU Director Bakanov. He publicly admitted to the public that a large number of SBU agents were suspected of treason. Immediately afterwards, under the leadership of the new SBU director, Brigadier General Vasily Malik, who had won the "Courage" medal for leading the anti-terrorism operation, and GUR director Kiril Budanov, the Ukrainian intelligence service began to send agents to the occupied areas again, launching a series of assassinations, sabotage and intelligence gathering operations.
Ukrainian Security Bureau (SBU) former director Bakanov (left) and current acting director Malik (right)
How do Ukrainian spies re-insert into the occupied area? Russia has announced the crackdown on Ukrainian Navy's "73rd Maritime Intelligence Center". The intelligence team is said to operate a route along the Dnieper River into the Russian-occupied area of Khlsong Prefecture, transporting the lurking teams in and out on multiple occasions. Along the transportation line, the intelligence team established a transit station, including a hunting ground by contacting local Ukrainians, taking advantage of the vast and sparse suburbs. The confession of the suspect in the hunting ground released by the Russian side said that they took the initiative to approach the nearby Russian troops, and after gaining favor, they observed and counted the local Russian troops' movements, while being responsible for transporting more spies to the occupied areas. After
arrived at the rear of the Russian-occupied area, assassination and sabotage were the most obvious activities of these spy teams. It is worth noting that these spy teams do not carry only a small number of weapons and homemade bombs. Judging from the information of the Ukrainian spy team reported by Russia, the Ukrainian army often leaves some secret weapons hiding points before evacuating towns. Ukrainian spies can quickly get a large amount of weapons supplies after returning to these towns. For example, in mid-September, many street gunfights broke out in the center of Khlsong. The outside world believes that this is likely to be an exposed firefight between Ukrainian spies and Russian troops. Judging from the sound, Ukrainian firepower configuration is very powerful.More specifically, on September 23, the Russian army informed a Ukrainian "five-man sabotage team". The team's equipment includes: AK-47 rifles, light machine guns, tens of thousands of bullets, grenades, , landmines, and even 9 anti-tank missiles, and launchers...
The Russian side believes that Du Jinna, the daughter of the famous Russian scholar Du Jin, was killed in a car explosion, which is the "masterpiece" of Ukrainian agents, but the Ukrainian intelligence agency did not recognize . Up to now, in the Ukrainian spy assassination that both sides recognized, the highest-ranking deceased is Sergei Gorenko, the Attorney General of the "Republic", who and his deputy were killed by homemade explosive devices in the office. In addition, most of the department heads of military and civilian authorities in various Russian-occupied areas have been killed in car bombs. Ukrainian spies also guided the Ukrainian military to "clear" Zhulavko, the former Ukrainian Supreme Rada representative who was sent to Russia, using the Himas rocket launcher. This incident happened when the four places "referendums to Russia" and had a great impact.
On August 23, a farewell ceremony for Dujinna's body was held in Moscow in
against Sardo, the highest head of the Russian military and civilian authorities in Khelson, and Ukrainian spies also carried out multiple assassinations. They first set up bombs on the way Saldo had to go home, but failed because they were discovered by Russian intelligence agencies. Immediately afterwards, they completed a poisonous assassination of Saldo in unknown ways. Saldo was therefore urgently transferred to Moscow for treatment and eventually escaped from danger.
However, none of the above are the most important assassination incidents. On September 30, under the guidance of spies, the Ukrainian army launched a long-range targeted strike on a residence in Kherson. Alexei Katrinichev, the first deputy leader of the Russian military and civilian authorities, died on the spot. At that time, Katrinichev had just arrived for any month and a half. He is a senior agent of the Russian Federation Security Bureau (FSB). He has served in the Russian military and Russian intelligence agencies for 25 years. This time he went to Khlsong Prefecture to serve as the first deputy leader of the military and civilian authorities. In fact, he is the supreme leader of the Russian side in the state.
Why did the Russian intelligence agency, which initially performed well, seem to have insufficient momentum after the "special military operation" six months after the "special military operation" was carried out and failed to stop the Ukrainian agents from making a comeback? It is undeniable that although the Russian side claims that more than 90% of residents in Khlsong, Zaporozeh, and other places support joining Russia, there are many local people who are "focused on Kiev". As the Ukrainian army counterattacked on the northern and southern fronts, some lower-level "collaborators" were afraid of being "liquidated" and chose to cooperate with Ukrainian spies.
TASS reported that after Ukrainian agents began to be active in the occupied southern area, some Ukrainian employees serving the city's critical infrastructure would suddenly flee overnight. This makes the occupying authorities need to send troops and recruit domestic Russian professionals to take over power stations, water plants and other infrastructure, and they are exhausted. After the original Ukrainian employees fled into the Ukrainian military controlled area, they will report the details of the critical infrastructure, which will also help the Ukrainian army to launch a precise strike on related facilities.
In the counterattack on the southern front, the most important result of the Ukrainian army also came from the contribution of the intelligence front, which was the acquisition of Khlsong's full-process security monitoring data and then carried out an accurate targeted strike. Of course, after the Ukrainian army launched an attack, Russian intelligence agencies quickly arrested the suspect through clues and found guns, ammunition, grenades and accessories for security monitoring equipment in his home. From these equipment, it can be inferred that if the Ukrainian army used this key informant more concealedly, Ukrainian spies might have further plans for subsequent plans, such as destroying the Khlsson security monitoring system, and then organizing the informant to escape unscathed.
"Crimea Bridge Explosion" stamp display board on the streets of Kiev
Experiences and lessons of Ukrainian spy war
Is the performance of Ukrainian intelligence agencies "good" or "bad"? This cannot be judged by the success or failure of a spy war. In the view of Western intelligence analysts, the problem of Ukrainian intelligence agencies before the war was not in action planning or intelligence strategy, but in their governance structure.Since the beginning of the "Special Military Operation", some problems have been resolved in the war, but there are also flaws that still exist.
"Ukrainian Intelligence Agency" includes three specific agencies: the Ukrainian Security Agency (SBU), the Major Intelligence Agency of the Ministry of Defense (GUR), and the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Agency (SZR). Among them, SBU directly inherited from the Ukrainian branch of KGB . SZR was originally the Foreign Intelligence Department of SBU. After the institutional reform in 2005, it was independently established and specialized in foreign intelligence collection. GUR is an intelligence organization founded from scratch after the collapse of in . Its early members all came from the intelligence department of the General Staff of the Soviet Army. In name, GUR is part of the Ukrainian army, but in fact its budget is independent of the Ministry of Defense. The GUR head directly reports to the Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Army, the Ukrainian President.
Simply put, SBU is equivalent to the US FBI (FBI ), SZR is equivalent to the CIA (CIA ), and GUR is the secret agency directly controlled by the president .
When the "Special Military Operation" began in 2022, Western intelligence colleagues were trying to solve the three major problems of Ukrainian intelligence agencies. is first of all, with a bloated staff, with SBU alone having more than 30,000 employees, and its size is seven times that of MI5 in the UK . The second is confusion of responsibilities. Countries around the world have similar understandings of the mission and functions of intelligence agencies, but because corruption in Ukrainian judicial organs has been rampant before and after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, successive Ukrainian governments since independence have tried to use intelligence networks to resolve judicial issues. The SBU is not only responsible for intelligence and counterintelligence tasks, but also for combating economic crimes in Ukraine. In other words, this is a hybrid of "Information Bureau + Anti-Corruption Bureau" .
The problem is that SBU agents are also affected by the corruption . A Western intelligence report pointed out that because of its participation in economic crime investigations, the agency has "ratiotemptation, abuse of power, corruption, secret prisons, and extortion have become popular in recent years." European and American intelligence agencies have long wanted to solve this problem. NATO has been involved in the reform of the SBU since 2005, with the overall goal of divesting non-intelligence functions in the SBU and then establishing an agency to combat economic crime and corruption under the office of the Ukrainian Attorney General. But in SBU's view, this is a "cutting off the way for people and money", so the reform has been underway for 17 years, and countless versions of the split plan have been released, but in the end there is no progress. This is true for
SBU, and the other two intelligence departments are "not much better". SZR is nominally independent after 2005, but its budget is still under the control of the SBU. On the one hand, this made SZR unable to get rid of the corruption of SBU; on the other hand, in the critical period of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine from 2014 to 2022, in order to avoid SZR's "growing the bigger" and obstructing the iteration of the SZR leadership, SBU did not allow the main leaders of SZR to exercise its legal power to "report directly to the president." In 2019, Zelensky's "family boy" Bakanov served as the director of the SBU, further restricting the independent authority of SZR. What about the GUR, which is affiliated with the Ministry of National Defense and independent of the original KGB system? Western intelligence reports pointed out that unfortunately, GUR has also bred corruption that lacks supervision because it is not bound by the Ministry of Defense. At the same time, because the Ukrainian Defense Minister and Chief of General Staff could not control GUR, they could only rely on border defense forces and National Guard to collect military intelligence on the Russian-Ukrainian border. As a result, before February 24 this year, although the Ukrainian army gathered troops to the border, they did not make precise preparations for Russia's defense and fell into an extremely passive situation at the beginning of the war.
The third problem raised by European and American analysts is more serious: Some of the cases mentioned earlier in this article have shown that many Ukrainian spies have links with the Russian Federation Intelligence Agency (FSB). What is the reason? Until 2014, about one-third of the entire Ukrainian intelligence system were born in Russia and received intelligence training in Moscow. Their old friends were all FSB agents . In addition, Nikola Golushko, who had been the head of the KGB Ukrainian branch before the disintegration, returned to Moscow after Ukraine's independence and later became one of the founders of the FSB. These documents became "a valuable source for extortion and exploitation of Ukrainian intelligence personnel."
Therefore, it is not surprising that when the Crimean crisis and the Donbas War occurred in 2014, "more than one-third of the local Ukrainian agents" including the head of the local branch of SBU quickly joined the Russian camp and transformed into employees of the occupying the authorities' counter-espionage department. Some analysts believe that if Zelensky had not replaced "more than 90% of the middle-level officials" in the original SBU system since 2019, the "joke" of the Ukrainian intelligence network would have been even bigger at the beginning of this year's "special military operation".
Have these problems in the Ukrainian intelligence system been resolved since February? It is certain that if it is not resolved at all, Ukraine will not be able to achieve the aforementioned results. The reason is that after entering the "wartime state", Zelensky quickly built a command system centered on the Ukrainian Ukrainian Command. Especially after the Kiriev Oolong incident in March, the barriers between Ukrainian intelligence departments and the military were completely opened up. Many details can confirm this: the Ukrainian General Staff can release intelligence information like intelligence agencies; the Ukrainian spy team infiltrated into the occupied areas can directly contact the Ukrainian army on the front line to transmit intelligence; among the Ukrainian intelligence teams cracked by Russia, many of them are composed of Ukrainian military personnel, but are led by intelligence departments, which shows that the two sides have also integrated personnel.
October 14 is Ukraine's "Defenders Day". Kiev held a commemorative event
. At the same time, the strong national sentiment of has inspired more Ukrainians to participate in intelligence work . Since late July, the Ukrainian intelligence department has publicly solicited Russian military information from residents of the occupied areas of the southern line, including the address coordinates of the Russian military deployment points, the details of the transportation road network, and the identity information of the Ukrainians who are "cooperating" with the Russian side. Some Ukrainian scholars say that the total number of participants in online intelligence collection exceeds 100,000.
It is worth noting that among the Ukrainian intelligence team officially announced the crackdown by Russia, many of them are composed of nationalist armed personnel such as the "Azov Camp". It is hard to say whether they represent the main force of the current Ukrainian intelligence war, but to say that they have replaced corrupt, pro-Russian Ukrainian "old agents" to a certain extent. However, perhaps it is precisely because of the lack of spy war experience that these groups have been repeatedly cracked by the Russian side and have failed to play a greater role.
Generally speaking, the Russian-Ukrainian spy war since February, especially Ukraine's agent activities in the occupied areas have shifted from "full defeat" to "often won" , which is worthy of the attention of intelligence departments around the world. Although we can summarize our experience from the aspects of reforming the intelligence command system, creatively developing intelligence personnel, and participating in intelligence warfare for the whole people, the most important point of is perhaps: no matter how powerful intelligence technology and strategy are, they need to have the hearts and opinions of the people as the basis.
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