Ukraine is carrying out an operation to purge double agents infiltrated in the country’s secret services, in an investigation based on allegations that high-ranking traitors prepared an invasion of Russia and helped enemy forces take control of Ukraine. Kherson city and Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Members of Russia’s secret service, the FSB, have infiltrated Ukraine’s SBU as well as some local governments, and have managed to weaken Ukraine from within, with pro-Moscow help, said Tetyana Sabian, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office. Ukrainian officials fled the country in 2014.
The official says the discovery may just be “the tip of the iceberg”.
“The network is much wider, and the investigation wants to find out all the circumstances and actions of individuals, which caused the rapid seizure of the southern part by the aggressor forces, of the annexed lands of Crimea,” Sabian explains.
Earlier this month, the Ukrainian authorities ended the investigation targeting Oleh Kulenich, a former regional officer of the Crimean State Security Department and a native of Kherson, who would be one of the mentors in the operation.
Investigators believe that Kulinich is actually a Russian FSB agent. “In the first hours of the invasion, Kulinich deliberately stopped any attempts to inform the command of the real situation in the Kherson region. He did not take any measures to protect the sovereignty of Ukraine. He instructed the personnel to leave the duty station. To people who have nothing to do with the Special Security Unit.”
Cullench was arrested last July and charged with high treason. If convicted in court, he faces a life sentence. The investigation concluded that he would take orders from Ukraine’s former deputy defense minister, Volodymyr Sivkovych, who fled the country in 2014.
Successfully rising through the ranks of Ukraine’s intelligence services under the instructions of the former governor, Kulinić claimed the State Security Department and Investigative Bureau, “managed to destroy or endanger the work of the central government from within, infiltrate other enemy agents and unbalance the work finished”. The suspect of high treason also “deliberately misled the leadership about the true intentions of the Russian special services.
The double agent was fired by Zelensky in March last year, but according to RBC, Kulinich has continued to work as an advisor and adviser to the former leader of the KGB, Ivan Bakanov.
Subsequently, Bakanov was dismissed by Zelensky the day after Kulenich’s arrest, claiming that a large number of officials in that body had been “caught” in wrongful or illegal actions while under his command.
