Photo: Security Service of Ukraine

Ukraine’s main domestic security agency has announced the arrest of two Chinese nationals on suspicion of espionage, specifically concerning Ukraine’s vaunted Neptune anti-ship missile, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

Neptune missiles, which Ukraine used to sink the Moskva, the former flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, during the first year of the war, and were subsequently used to target Russian offshore oil terminals, constitute a vital component of Kyiv’s emerging domestic defence sector.

In a statement published Wednesday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said that one of the arrested individuals is a 24-year-old former university student, who was expelled from “a Kyiv technical university” in 2023 for academic failure and has since then resided in Ukraine.

The other, the SBU says, is his father, who does not live in Ukraine, but “periodically visited” Ukraine in order to “personally coordinate his son’s spy work”.

“The SBU’s counterintelligence exposed the spy [the father] at the early stage of his intelligence activity and caught him red-handed while he was receiving classified documents,” the statement read.

According to Reuters, the two men were the first Chinese spies to be arrested in Ukraine since the war began.

In April 2025, Kyiv sanctioned three Chinese firms accused of helping Russia produce Iskander missiles, and demanded an explanation from Beijing after Chinese nationals were discovered to be fighting for the Russian military in eastern Ukraine.

At the time, the Chinese Foreign Ministry denied providing troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine and maintained that any accusations of aiding Russia’s war effort were baseless.

On Friday, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi allegedly told Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, that Beijing could not afford to see Russia lose its war against Ukraine.

The Chinese Embassy in Kyiv has not yet responded to a request for a comment, Reuters says.