In the space of a few days the Ukrainian administration trembled. Nearly 650 investigations for “high treason” and “collaboration” with Moscow have been opened. They mainly target Ukrainian law enforcement agencies. On Sunday July 17, President Volodymyr Zelensky thus announced that he wanted to dismiss the head of the special services Ivan Bakanov and the general prosecutor, Iryna Venediktova, accusing them of insufficient efforts in the fight against spies and Moscow collaborators. A decision validated on Tuesday by a vote in Parliament.
On the same day, Vitali Kim, the governor of the Mykolaiv region in the constantly bombed southern Ukraine, announced a bonus of 100 dollars for those who will help identify Russian collaborators. He also indicated that he planned to “close” the city of Mykolaiv for a few days in order to neutralize the traitors and collaborators of the Russians. Paranoia or imminent danger?
An important Russian network in Ukraine
If the fight against the traitors is mediatized only today, it is however very intense since the beginning of the war. And even since the start of Volodymyr Zelensky’s mandate in 2019, according to Fenwick Gallagher, author of “Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine in the blood” (published by Editions du Rocher on May 22). “Initially, when he appoints his childhood friend Ivan Bakanov as head of the country’s internal security (the SBU), it is to illustrate the way in which he intends to clean up, recalls the journalist Barkanov has nothing to do with this environment, he is completely incompetent, which is a pledge of innocence to corruption in the Zelensky logic”.
Nevertheless, Russia has a large network of moles, which it has been working on for decades. “Initially, the Russians thought they could take Ukraine in four days, recalls Galia Ackerman, specialist in the post-Soviet Russian world and editor-in-chief of the media Desk Russia. They surely thought they could rely on a much denser network of collaborators “. And for good reason: the SBU, Ukrainian internal intelligence, has been closely linked to the KGB. “These two services were very strongly intertwined, relates Fenwick Gallagher. The split only appeared in 2014 with the Maidan revolution. With the departure of President Viktor Yanukovych, half of the SBU agents, including the first knives, made defection and goes to the Russian side”. Even today, many analysts estimate that one in five SBU agents works directly for the FSB (former KGB), or was trained at the FSB academy. “In all this, it is also very difficult to know who is entirely dedicated to Ukraine, who is ideologically pro-Russian and who navigates between the two… Hence this totally justified paranoia of Volodymyr Zelensky”, adds Fenwick Gallagher.
For example, specialist Galia Ackerman points to the situation in the port city of Kherson. It was the first major city in the country to fall into the hands of the Russians on the seventh day of the invasion, without any resistance according to the testimonies reported. “I believe that this capture is a successful operation of the FSB. There were necessarily double agents for a city like that to fall so quickly”.
As everywhere, “there are war profiteers”
Wars, without exception, are conducive to betrayal. France commemorated this Sunday, July 17 the 80th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup… But betrayals are not only ideological, they can also occur with the lure of gain. “There are clearly war profiteers betraying their homeland for money,” notes journalist Fenwick Gallagher. Especially since, according to Galia Ackerman, Russia has several million dollars to invest in order to “buy Ukrainians”. “Some people may have acted in the interest of the Russians because she had the ideology, but most of them were bought off.”
In recent months, at least three senior SBU officials have been charged with high treason for the benefit of Moscow in recent months. One of them, Oleg Koulinitch, sacked in March and arrested on Sunday, had been based in Kherson. “Ukraine does not want to use the old kgbist methods which make people disappear, because it is also playing its membership within the European Union, analyzes Fenwick Gallagher. There will be investigations, and all those who are suspected will be judged. for high treason”.
In addition, by repeated requests for precision artillery systems from Western countries, Ukraine portends a counter-offensive in the coming weeks. “With 30,000 agents, the SBU is a crucial weapon of war and before attacking, it is necessary to ensure that everyone is reliable and in battle order. Hence, perhaps, this sudden hunt to traitors, observes the journalist author of the portrait of Volodymyr Zelensky. The idea is to tighten the screws and send a clear message inside. Now it is certain that there are still very successful Russian double agents as well as dormant cells”.