“The chief of staff of the SBU anti-terrorist center worked for the enemy”. It is by This press release Published this Wednesday, February 12, that the Ukrainian intelligence services, the SBU, announced that they had arrested a high -ranking official of his administration for trying to transmit confidential information to Russia.
The “rat” operation, as the Ukrainian information was nicknamed, was conducted this Wednesday. If the SBU has not communicated the name of the agent in his press release, the Ukrainian media The Kyiv Independent Ensures that it is the Colonel Dmytro Koziura, according to sources in the Ukrainian secret services. The latter claim to have identified 14 episodes of the illegal activity of the “traitor”, which is prosecuted for “high betrayal”, a crime liable to a very heavy prison sentence.
“The neutralization of such a traitor is, without exaggeration, a special historical operation, given the level of the agent, his vocational training and the extent of the damage that he could potentially cause the safety of the State during the war, “said Vassyl Maliouk, head of the SBU. It is the latter in person who claims to have directed the arrest of the “rat”, as designated. In the press release published this Wednesday, we see him photographed as a military trellis grabbing the defendant’s neck, the latter having hands tied in the back.
A dormant agent since 2018
According to the SBU survey, Dmytro Koziura was recruited in 2018 in Vienna by Russian secret services, for ideological but also financial reasons. This would then have been placed in a dormant cell since since, when he has held the post of chief of staff of the SBU anti-terrorist center since 2016. Until December 2024, the date from which the FSB would have contact with him.
His missions were varied: collecting and transmitting information on the Ukrainian defense, but also on kyiv’s knowledge of Russian movements on the front. According to the SBU press release, Russia also wanted to obtain classified information on the weapons of the Ukrainian defense forces, the state of critical infrastructure in the country, the results of Russian missile attacks or data on the senior military and political officials of the country. The file does not stop only with him: the parents of the “traitor” are also targeted by the investigation for having justified the Russian invasion, praised Vladimir Putin, or even having been aware of the work of their son for the FSB.
If Dmytro Koziura is far from being the first Russian spy to be exposed by kyiv, the fact that Russia has managed to place agents at such a level of responsibility shows that it has managed to infiltrate part of the device Ukrainian state – even if their real influence remains questionable. Ukrainian information took advantage of this arrest to affirm that the internal purge to unmask Russian spies was still underway. “The enemy may try to infiltrate our ranks, he will not succeed. Because we detect them, documents and stop them in due course,” said SBU chief, Vassyl Maliouk, also saying to have ” Used the traitor to feed the enemy with a large amount of disinformation “.