SVIATOHIRSK, Ukraine — As Russia’s remorseless offensive keeps gaining ground in the east, Ukraine’s besieged security service is working overtime to catch the enemy from within — a network of Russian saboteurs, collaborators and secret sympathizers with deep roots throughout the large part of the country still controlled by Kyiv.
Ukraine and Russia have deep cultural, linguistic, economic and religious ties dating back centuries, so it is no surprise that the current 600-mile-plus front line separating Russian and Ukrainian forces does not also mark a neat boundary between pro- and anti-Russian populations.
For just a taste of the difficulty divided loyalties can pose, consider the footage, recorded from inside an unmarked car by an unseen driver somewhere in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, showing a man in a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and his face obscured sitting in the passenger seat.
A few seconds into the recording, an anonymous agent gives the go-ahead over the radio to his colleagues: “Let’s get to work” he says sternly, his right hand resting on the car door.
“Wait a minute,” he tells him the driver.
The attention of both agents is directed about 50 yards away at a man dressed in a dark blue gym suit. Their target has his back turned to them, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’s being intently watched as he gets into his car.
Before he has the time to turn on the ignition, a dusty green SUV breaks into the video frame, its tires screeching, and parks right behind him, blocking his escape.
Three armed men wearing camouflage attire, balaclavas and bulletproof vests jump out and apprehend the driver, throwing him to the ground and handcuffing him.
Recorded on October 16, this video was shared with The Washington Times by one of the agents of the Sluzhba bezpeka Ukrainy — the Ukrainian Security Service, known by its initials SBU — who took part in the arrest.
According to the investigation summary, the 34-year-old suspect had “collected and transmitted without authorization … information on the shipment and movement of weapons, armaments and ammunition,” as well as on the “movements or deployment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine […] with the possibility of identifying them on the territory […] of the Donetsk region, to an employee of the Russian Federation.”
Posing as a volunteer of a group working with the U.N. World Food Program, the man had reportedly been traveling around the besieged Donetsk city of Pokrovsk under the cover of delivering humanitarian aid to local residents. Kyiv officials charge he was using his position to spy on Ukrainian defenses and troop concentrations, passing on the data to the FSB.
Big job
While the operation was swift and striking, it is just an ordinary day at the office for the SBU agents.
A simple search on the SBU’s Telegram channel reveals a stark record of the scope of the problem with Russian infiltration: In and around the city of Pokrovsk alone, people suspected of helping Russia are reported being arrested on six different dates in a five-week span ending in mid-October.
Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the sprawling SBU has grown into the country’s primary law enforcement, intelligence and security agency fighting both internal and external threats.
Having inherited most of its personnel, equipment and intelligence-gathering capabilities from the Soviet-era “Committee for State Security” or KDB, Soviet-era sister agency to Moscow’s feared KGB, the SBU was initially hampered by multiple issues, including corruption, cosy relations with criminal elements and questionable loyalties.
The war has made its mission, its competence and its loyalties critical to the Ukrainian government as it tries to fight off its bigger, better-armed neighbor.
While many Soviet intelligence networks disintegrated following the collapse of the USSR, numerous informal ties between Russian and Ukrainian security officials endured, cultivated by Moscow in the years leading up to its February 2022 invasion. That infiltration has in turn weakened Ukraine’s security apparatus, rendering the country vulnerable to covert and overt operations.
The issue was put on full display in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula and a Moscow-underwritten separatist rebellion in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region escalated into a full-scale war. In the spring of 2014, an estimated 90% of the SBU staff in Crimea either resigned or joined the ranks of Russia’s FSB.
“Only 10% of the Crimean SBU employees moved to mainland Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea,” Serhiy Pashinsky, then head of the national parliament’s Committee on National Security and Defense, said at the time.
Having undergone multiple reforms and increased its cooperation with Western intelligence agencies in the years since, the SBU has moved away from the Soviet model, enhancing its accountability and counterintelligence capabilities.
Yet, while the security service itself has been slowly rebuilt into a modern, well-equipped agency on par with many of its Western counterparts, the issue of Russian infiltration in Ukraine is far from resolved.
Religious divide
As the press releases and pictures put out following each arrest of suspected Russian collaborators attest, saboteurs and agents are being recruited among all strata of Ukrainian society. Invariably handcuffed and flanked by balaclava-clad SBU agents in bulletproof vests, their faces blurred, the suspects can be seen wearing civilian clothing, military uniforms – and, sometimes, religious garments.
According to Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the SBU, a number of priests of the “Ukrainian Orthodox Church” have been cooperating with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, presenting an unusual challenge for security services.
“If someone wearing a cassock via his phone adjusts enemy fire targeting a residential quarter in Luhansk region, what does this have to do with God?” Mr. Maliuk said during a March 2024 interview on Ukrainian television. “Can a cassock and some incense serve as an indulgence in this case? Of course, they can’t. We will bring them to justice, like anyone else.”
Prior to its activities being banned in August of this year, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP) — the country’s largest ecclesiastical body, with long-established links to the Moscow Orthodox patriarchate – had long been viewed with distrust by Ukrainian society at large. A May 2023 survey published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 82% of Ukrainians did not trust the UOC-MP, and 63% of respondents believed that it should be completely banned in Ukraine.
One of the many clergymen recently arrested on suspicion of collaborating with Moscow was the metropolitan, or head cleric, of the Sviatohirsk monastery in the oblast of Donetsk, one of the main holy sites of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine.
On April 24, 2024, the SBU accused Metropolitan Arseniy of having “tipped off” Ukrainian military positions in the region to the Russians. According to the investigation, the cleric had given the locations of checkpoints around the city of Kramatorsk during one of his sermons, which was filmed and later posted on the website of the monastery, as well as on local Telegram channels.
One monk at the metropolitan’s monastery condemned the arrest as unjust.
“They want to put him in front of a court, but they have no evidence whatsoever to back up their claims,” Father Oleg, a priest of the Sviatohirsk monastery, said in an interview. The priest, a native of Siberia, had agreed to speak to a reporter about the ban on the activities of the UOC-MP on the condition that he not be identified by his real name, citing a fear of “reprisals” from the authorities.
“So far, thank God, no one has come to bother us, they are leaving us alone,” Fr. Oleg said in a hushed tone as he walked among the monastery’s lush flower beds and its shrapnel-riddled chapels.
“We live as our predecessors did over the past centuries,” he said, insisting that he did not “concern [himself] with politics.”
It’s an oft-repeated mantra among the Ukrainian clergymen who had once answered to Moscow. Father Oleg said that neither the monastery nor the church at large has anything to do with Russia and its outspokenly pro-war patriarch Kirill, a close political ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But while direct financial and ecumenical links may have been severed by the war, it became clear that the clergyman espoused a worldview strikingly similar to the one told by the Kremlin and Russian state media, a worldview seemingly at odds with his professed apolitical stance.
Minutes after insisting to a reporter that all he wished for was “peace, peace at last,” the clergyman offered up a conspiracy-laden diatribe interspersed with homophobic, racist and antisemitic observations on the state of the modern world. Holy Russia, he argued, stood as the last bastion of white Christianity and of traditional values being abandoned by the morally corrupt West.
As for Ukraine’s chances in the war, he remarked, “Do you know what Bismarck’s last advice to the German people was? Never fight with the Russians.”
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.