The CIA has been training Ukrainian intelligence officers for a long time: together they are actively fighting Russia

The CIA provided Ukraine with advanced surveillance systems, trained recruits at facilities in Ukraine as well as in the United States, built new headquarters for Ukrainian military intelligence units and shared intelligence with it on an unimaginable scale, reports Washington Post.

Photo: IStock

The cluttered car containing the mother and her 12-year-old daughter hardly seemed to merit the attention of Russian security forces as it approached the border checkpoint. But the least visible piece of luggage - the cat's cage - was part of an elaborate and deadly plan. Ukrainian operatives installed a secret compartment in a pet carrier and used it to hide bomb components, according to security officials familiar with the operation.

Four weeks later, the device exploded near Moscow in an SUV driven by the daughter of a Russian nationalist who had called for his country to “kill, kill, kill” Ukrainians. This explosion signaled that the heart of Russia would not be spared.

The operation was organized by Ukraine's Internal Security Service (SBU), according to the officials, who provided details including the use of a pet cage that had not previously been disclosed. The August 2022 attack is part of a raging shadow war in which Ukrainian intelligence services have also twice bombed a bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea, aimed drones at the roof of the Kremlin and blasted holes in the hulls of Russian warships in the Black Sea.

Connections with the CIA

The operations were seen as last resort measures that Ukraine was forced to take in response to the Russian invasion last year. In fact, they represent capabilities that Ukrainian spy agencies have been developing for nearly a decade since Russia first seized Ukrainian territory in 2014, a period during which the agencies also forged deep new ties to the CIA.

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The missions involved elite teams of Ukrainian operatives drawn from directorates that were formed, trained and equipped in close cooperation with the CIA, according to current and former Ukrainian and American officials. Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to turn Ukraine's Soviet-era services into powerful allies against Moscow, officials say.

The CIA maintains a significant presence in Kyiv, officials say.

The extent of CIA interaction with Ukrainian security services has not previously been disclosed. U.S. intelligence officials stressed that the agency was not involved in targeted kill operations and that its work was focused on enhancing the agency's ability to gather intelligence on dangerous adversaries. A senior intelligence official said that “any potential operational concerns were clearly communicated to Ukrainian services.”

Liquidations

Many of Ukraine's covert operations had clear military objectives and contributed to the country's defense. But the car bombing that killed Daria Dugina underscored how Ukraine is using what officials in Kyiv call “liquidations” as a weapon of war.

Over the past 20 months, the SBU and its military counterpart GUR have carried out dozens of assassinations of Russian officials in occupied territories, alleged Ukrainian collaborators, officers behind the front lines and prominent supporters of the war deep inside Russia. Those killed include a former Russian submarine commander who was jogging in a park in southern Russia's Krasnodar and a militant blogger at a cafe in St. Petersburg, Ukrainian and Western officials said.

Ukraine's penchant for lethal operations has complicated its cooperation with the CIA, raising concerns among some officials in Kyiv and Washington about the agency's complicity. Even those who believe such lethal missions are justified in wartime question the usefulness of certain strikes and decisions that led to attacks on civilians, including Dugina or her father Alexander Dugin (who officials admit was the intended target ).

“We have too many enemies that are more important to neutralize,” said a senior Ukrainian security official. — People who launch rockets. People who committed atrocities in Bucha.” The murder of the daughter of a pro-war firebrand is “very cynical,” an official said.

A scary trend

Others have expressed broader concerns about Ukraine's ruthless tactics, which may now seem justified - especially against a country accused of widespread military atrocities.

“We are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services similar to the Mossad in the 1970s,” said a former senior CIA official, referring to the Israeli spy service that has long been accused of carrying out assassinations in other countries. Ukraine's experience in such operations "carries risks for Russia," the official said, "but also carries broader risks."

“If Ukraine's intelligence operations become even more bold—for example, targeting Russians in third countries—one can imagine how this could cause friction with partners and lead to serious conflict with Ukraine's broader strategic goals,” the official said. Among these goals are membership in NATO and the European Union.

The CIA declined to comment.

“All the purposes for which the SBU operates are completely legal,” said agency director Vasily Malyuk. The statement did not specifically refer to targeted killings, but Malyuk, who met with senior CIA and other US officials in Washington last month, said Ukraine was "doing everything to ensure that just punishment will be met" with all traitors, military criminals and collaborators."

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Current and former U.S. and Ukrainian officials said both sides sought to maintain a distance between the CIA and deadly operations. CIA officials raised objections after some operations, but the agency did not withdraw support, officials said.

“We have never involved our international partners in covert operations, especially behind the front lines,” said a former senior Ukrainian security official. The SBU and GUR operatives were not accompanied by CIA officers. Ukraine avoided the use of weapons and equipment that could be traced to the US, and even secret funding streams were separated.

“We had a lot of limitations in our operational work with the Ukrainians,” said a former US intelligence official. The emphasis was "more on secure communications and trade" and finding new intelligence flows inside Russia, "rather than on how to blow up the mayor."

Despite this, officials acknowledged that the lines were sometimes blurred. CIA officers in Kyiv became aware of some of Ukraine's most ambitious strike plans. In some cases, including the Kerch Bridge explosion, US officials have expressed concern.

Ukrainian spies have developed their own line regarding which operations to discuss and which to keep secret. “There were some things we probably wouldn’t have talked about” with CIA colleagues, said a second Ukrainian security official involved in such missions. He said crossing those borders would result in the Americans' short answer: "We don't want any part of this."

Start of cooperation

Just last year, the CIA removed Ukraine from the agency's list of "non-brotherly" countries, which are considered such security threats that agency employees are prohibited from contacting their citizens without prior permission.

CIA-Ukraine cooperation took root after the 2014 political protests that prompted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to flee the country, followed by Russia's annexation of Crimea and the arming of separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The initial stages of cooperation were preliminary, officials said, given concerns on both sides that Ukraine's services remained heavily infiltrated by the FSB, the Russian agency that is the main successor to the KGB. To deal with this security risk, the CIA worked with the SBU to create an entirely new directorate, officials said. It, according to officials, will focus on so-called “active measures” operations against Russia and will be isolated from other units of the SBU.

The new unit was prosaically called the “Fifth Directorate” to distinguish it from the four long-standing units of the SBU. A sixth directorate has since been added to deal with the British spy agency MI6, officials said.

The training sites were located outside of Kyiv, where selected recruits received instruction from CIA officers, officials said. The plan was to form units capable of operating behind the front lines and operating as covert groups.

The agency provided secure communications, eavesdropping equipment that allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian phone calls and emails, and even provided camouflage and separatist uniforms to make it easier to infiltrate occupied cities.

Early missions focused on recruiting informants among Russian proxy forces, as well as cyber and electronic eavesdropping, officials said. The SBU also began conducting sabotage operations and missions to capture separatist leaders and Ukrainian collaborators, some of whom were taken to secret detention facilities.

But the operation soon took a fatal turn. Over one three-year period, at least half a dozen Russian fighters, senior separatist commanders or collaborators were killed in violence that was often attributed to internal score-settling but was in fact the work of the SBU.

Among those killed was Yevgeny Zhilin, the leader of a pro-Russian militant group in eastern Ukraine, who was shot dead in 2016 in a Moscow restaurant. A year later, a rebel commander known as "Givi" was killed in Donetsk in an operation that used a woman who had accused him of rape to plant a bomb near him.

Ukrainian officials said the country's shift to more lethal methods was prompted by Russian aggression, atrocities attributed to its proxies and desperation to find ways to weaken a more powerful adversary.

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“Because of this hybrid war, we are faced with a completely new reality,” said Valentin Nalyvaichenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who served as director of the SBU in 2015, when the Fifth Directorate was created. “We were forced to train our people differently.”

He declined to elaborate.

Transformation of Ukrainian military intelligence

While helping to create the new SBU directorate, the CIA embarked on a much more ambitious project with Ukrainian military intelligence.

With fewer than 5000 employees, the GUR was only a minor part of the SBU and had a narrower focus on espionage and active measures operations against Russia. It also had a younger workforce with fewer remnants of Soviet times, while the SBU was still believed to be infiltrated by Russian intelligence.

“We calculated that GUR was a smaller, more flexible organization where we could have more influence,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Ukraine. — Power steering was our little brainchild. We provided them with new equipment and training.”
The GUR officers “were young guys, not Soviet-era KGB generals,” the official said, “while the SBU was too big to reform.”

Even recent events seem to confirm such fears. Former SBU director Ivan Bakanov was forced to resign from his job last year amid criticism that the agency was not aggressive enough in its fight against internal traitors. Last year, the SBU also discovered that Russian-made modems were still being used in the agency's networks.

Since 2015, the CIA has begun such a large-scale transformation of the Main Intelligence Directorate that in just a few years, “we kind of rebuilt it from scratch,” according to a former US intelligence officer, one of the main architects of the project, who served as head of the CIA office in Kiev, and now heads the Operations group on Ukraine at CIA headquarters.

The GID has begun recruiting for its new Active Measures Division, officials said. At sites in Ukraine and later in the United States, GUR officers were trained in a variety of skills, from covert maneuvers behind enemy lines to weapons platforms and explosives. U.S. officials said the training was aimed at helping Ukrainian troops defend themselves in dangerous Russian-controlled environments, not at harming Russian facilities.

According to officials, the CIA helped the GUR acquire state-of-the-art surveillance and electronic eavesdropping systems. These included mobile equipment that could be placed along Russian-controlled lines in eastern Ukraine, as well as software tools used to hack the mobile phones of Kremlin officials visiting the occupied territory from Moscow.

According to officials, these systems were operated by Ukrainian officers, but all the information collected was transferred to the Americans.

Concerned that outdated GUR facilities were likely compromised by Russian intelligence, the CIA paid for the construction of new headquarters buildings for the GUR's paramilitary "special forces" unit and a separate directorate responsible for electronic espionage.

“In one day, we could intercept 250 to 000 individual messages” from Russian military and FSB units, a former senior GUR official said. “There was so much information that we couldn’t handle it ourselves,” he said.

Huge amounts of data were transferred through a new facility built by the CIA back to Washington, where it was carefully examined by CIA analysts, officials said.

Over time, the GUR also created a network of sources within the Russian security apparatus, including the FSB unit responsible for operations in Ukraine. As part of the trust between the United States and Ukraine, the CIA was allowed to have direct contact with agents recruited and managed by Ukrainian intelligence, officials said.

The resulting intelligence was largely hidden from the public, with few exceptions. The SBU began releasing incriminating communications intercepts, including footage of Russian commanders discussing their country's culpability in the 2014 shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines passenger plane.

Even so, officials said the intelligence obtained through U.S.-Ukrainian cooperation has its limits.

For example, the Biden administration's prescient warnings about Russian President Vladimir Putin's determination to overthrow the Kiev government were based primarily on isolated streams of intelligence that Ukraine was not initially privy to.

In some ways, officials said, Ukraine's own fundraising efforts fueled Zelensky and others' skepticism about Putin's plans by eavesdropping on military and FSB units that were themselves not briefed before the war began. “They were getting an accurate picture from people who were also in the dark,” said one US official.

Targeting Moscow with drones

Russian troops never managed to take Kyiv. But both CIA-funded GUR structures were among dozens of key facilities hit by Russian attacks in the early days of the war, according to officials, who said the facilities survived and remain operational.

Ukraine's new intelligence capabilities proved valuable from the very beginning of the war. The SBU, for example, received intelligence on important Russian targets, which allowed them to carry out strikes that killed several commanders.

Over the past year, intelligence agency missions have increasingly focused on targets not only behind enemy lines, but also deep inside Russia.

For the SBU, no target was a higher priority than the Kerch Bridge, which connects mainland Russia with the annexed Crimean Peninsula. The bridge is a key military corridor and is of such symbolic importance to Putin that he presided over its opening in 2018.

The SBU has blown up the bridge twice in the past year, including an explosion in October 2022 that killed five people and left a hole in the westbound lanes.

Zelensky initially denied Ukraine was responsible. But SBU director Malyuk described the operation in extreme detail in an interview earlier this year, admitting that his service planted powerful explosives in a truck carrying industrial-sized rolls of cellophane.

As in other SBU projects, the operation involved unwitting accomplices, including a truck driver who died in the explosion. “We went through seven circles of hell, keeping so many people in the dark,” Malyuk said in an interview about the operation, which he said depended on the receptivity of “ordinary Russian smugglers.”

US officials, who were notified in advance, expressed concern about the attack. Nine months later, the SBU launched a second strike on the bridge using naval drones developed as part of a top-secret operation involving the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies.

Malyuk's public account of the operation challenges typical intelligence prowess, but serves Kyiv's need to claim success and reflects the growing rivalry with the GUR. Kirill Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence, has a habit of touting his service's achievements and mocking Moscow.

The two services overlap to some degree operationally, although officials say the SBU tends to perform more complex tasks with longer turnaround times, while the RUR tends to work at a faster pace.

Ukrainian officials have denied that any agency was directly involved in the September 2 attack on the Nord Stream 2022 pipeline in the Baltic Sea, although U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies have concluded that Ukraine was involved in the plot.

The GUR used its own fleet of drones to carry out dozens of attacks on Russian territory, including strikes that penetrated Russian air defenses and hit buildings in Moscow. These included an operation in May 2023 in which a section of the Kremlin roof was briefly set on fire.

The strikes involved both long-range drones launched from Ukraine and groups of operatives and guerrillas operating inside Russia, officials said. The engines for some drones were purchased from Chinese suppliers using private funding that cannot be traced back to Ukrainian sources.

Murders in Russia

In July, former Russian submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky was shot four times in the chest in Krasnodar, where he reportedly worked as a military commissar. Rzycki, 42, is known to have used the fitness app Strava to record his daily running routes, a practice that could have revealed his location.

The police department issued an evasive statement, noting that “due to heavy rain, the park was empty” and there were no witnesses. Officials in Kyiv confirmed that responsibility for this lies with the GUR.

Even while admitting responsibility for such actions, Ukrainian officials declare their moral position against Russia. The SBU and GUR sought to avoid harming innocent bystanders even during lethal operations, while Russian raids and indiscriminate strikes resulted in the deaths or injuries of thousands of civilians, officials said.

Security officials said that no major SBU or GUR operation is carried out without permission - tacit or otherwise - from Zelensky.

Skeptics, however, worry that Ukraine's use of targeted killings and drone strikes on Moscow high-rises does not help its case against Russia or its long-term aspirations to join NATO and the EU.

A senior Ukrainian official who has worked closely with Western governments coordinating support for Ukraine said attacks on civilians and bombings of Moscow buildings fuel Putin's false view that Ukraine poses a growing danger to ordinary Russians.

This seems to be a minority view. Others believe the attacks boost Ukrainian morale. Many Ukrainians are skeptical about the possibility of adequate sanctions from the United Nations and international courts.

The car bombing that killed Dugina last year remains one of the most extreme cases of deadly revenge - it involved not only civilians, but also a Ukrainian woman and a seemingly unsuspecting teenage girl.

Russian authorities had barely finished clearing the rubble when the FSB named 42-year-old Natalya Vovk as the main suspect. According to the FSB, she entered Russia from Estonia in July, rented an apartment in the same complex as Dugina and spent several weeks conducting surveillance before leaving back to Estonia with her daughter after the explosion.

The attack was aimed at killing Dugin as he and his daughter were leaving a cultural festival where the pro-war ideologue, sometimes called "Putin's brain", was giving a lecture. They were supposed to go together, but Dugin got into another car.

At the time, Ukraine strongly condemned the attack.

“Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with this, because we are not a criminal state like Russia, and not a terrorist state,” said Zelensky adviser Mikhail Podolyak.

However, in recent interviews in Kyiv, officials admitted that these denials were false. They confirmed that the SBU planned and carried out the operation, and said that while Dugin may have been the main target, his daughter - also an active supporter of the invasion - was not an innocent victim.

“She is the daughter of the father of Russian propaganda,” the security official said. The car bombing and other operations inside Russia are a “narrative” showing Ukraine’s enemies that “punishment is inevitable even for those who consider themselves untouchable.”

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