"KYIV, Ukraine -- If Russia launches an all-out war with Ukraine, one of its most dangerous weapons will already be in Kyiv: A network of potential turncoats and moles that Moscow has cultivated for decades within Ukraine's military, intelligence and security forces.
That network is much smaller than when the conflict began in 2014 with Russia's grab of Crimea and covert invasion of the eastern Donbas region. At the time, two successive commanders of the Ukrainian navy switched sides to Russia, handing over most of the fleet, as did key security officials across the south and the east.
Since then, counterintelligence investigations, purges of people with Russian government connections and the promotions of combat veterans of the war against Russian-backed forces in Donbas significantly have reduced Moscow's infiltration, Ukrainian authorities say. Still, officials in Kyiv warn, a formidable challenge persists.
"The Russian intelligence network operating here has been installed a long time ago," said Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine's national-security adviser. "They have no other mission except destroying us as a nation."
The Ukrainian forces' ability to slow down and resist a Russian onslaught, giving time for international pressure on Moscow and a domestic resistance to grow, depends in great measure on Kyiv's capacity to maintain command and control -- and its success in hiding key assets and personnel from Russian airstrikes, sabotage and assassinations.
Ukrainian security officials warn that pro-Russian operatives could seriously undermine those efforts.
Sergei Markov, the pro-Kremlin director of the Institute for Political Studies in Moscow, told an audience on Echo of Moscow radio that the Ukrainian army will put up a "fleeting" resistance before embracing Russian troops," he said.
Such shifts happened en masse when Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014. At the time,Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych -- ousted by street protests triggered by his decision to abandon an association pact with the European Union -- fled to Russia. Several of his top ministers and advisers joined him.
Under Mr. Yanukovych, there was an unspoken order to Ukraine's intelligence services not to try limiting Russian influence, said Anton Gerashchenko, a former lawmaker and an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister.
In 2015, Ukraine's SBU domestic intelligence agency was hit by scandal when it sent a covert team to capture a Russian-backed militant leader in Donbas and word of the mission leaked. The three Ukrainian operatives were captured and thrown into a separatist jail. Eventually the officers were released in a prisoner exchange. Ukrainian counterintelligence officials believe their capture was the result of a betrayal by another high-ranking SBU employee.
In 2020, Ukrainian authorities arrested Maj. Gen. Valeriy Shaytanov, the chief of the SBU's Unit A, a counterterrorism special-operations branch, on charges that he helped Russia's intelligence operatives prepare the assassination of a Chechen dissident in Kyiv. He is behind bars awaiting trial.
Many current and former Ukrainian security officials openly suspect that some of their colleagues secretly work for Moscow. "A shadow structure has emerged inside the Ukrainian government to move information around known Kremlin assets," said a report this month by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, citing interviews with Ukrainian security and intelligence officials.
When the conflict with Russia began in 2014, an underpaid and largely demoralized Ukrainian military was commanded by a government that was reluctant to fight back and faced a better armed foe in Russia. In the following eight years of war, Ukraine's forces have gained battlefield experience and an esprit de corps as they lost more than 4,500 troops to Russia and its proxies in the Donbas. They also have undergone waves of reforms and refitting.
A government-run website names and shames perceived enemies of the Ukrainian state, and the army itself has carried out personnel purges.
Oleksandr Danylyuk, who served as Mr. Zelensky's national-security adviser in 2019, said Russia retains a large network, including within the SBU. Ukraine's GUR military intelligence service, however, is the least affected, he said." [1]
The lack of intelligence in Afghanistan has prevented us, the West, from operating with highest efficiency in that country because we did not know what to bomb. The Russians do not have such difficulties in Ukraine.
1. The Ukraine Crisis: Kyiv Warns Spies Poised to Move
Trofimov, Yaroslav; Cullison, Alan. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 23 Feb 2022: A.9.
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