“I like the darkness.” The head of Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR), Kyrylo Budanov, loves to live in the shadows. No light enters the office of the Ukrainian spymaster. However, Kyrylo Boudanov, 38 years old, regularly takes the media spotlight. After an interview in the worldpublished on January 11, this time he gave an interview to the famous British daily Financial Times.
As head of the Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Unit, a position to which he was appointed in 2020 by Volodymyr Zelensky, Kyrylo Budanov orchestrated Ukraine’s secret war against Russia, becoming one of the the most revered figures of Kiev’s response. He has survived ten known assassination attempts. When the head of the GUR goes out, he travels with bodyguards and intelligence agents, indicates the British daily. His wife, Marianna Boudanova, was intentionally poisoned with heavy metals last November, along with several GUR officers.
Continued actions in Russia
Kyrylo Budanov, a former special forces soldier who fought in Donbass in 2014 and who himself took part in secret missions, promises to continue carrying out actions inside Russia itself in order to sabotage the machine Vladimir Putin’s war campaign. “We do not foresee any radical changes in the near future,” Kyrylo Boudanov told Financial Times. “Everything we have done, we will continue to do.”
On Thursday January 18, Ukraine attacked an oil depot in northern Russia using drones, a source within the Ukrainian security services told AFP. According to this source, Ukrainian military intelligence is responsible for this operation in the Leningrad region, around Saint Petersburg, located nearly 1,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
“Not a single proof” of Prigozhin’s death
The head of Ukrainian military intelligence does not hide kyiv’s current difficulties on the front. “To say that everything is going well is not true,” he says of Ukraine’s much-vaunted counter-offensive in 2023, which has failed to achieve its objectives. But, according to him, “to say that there is a catastrophe is not true either.” Kyrylo Boudanov refuses to make bold predictions for the year 2024. “I hope that our success will be greater than theirs,” he simply replies.
Asked by The world on the state of mind of the Ukrainian population two years after the invasion, he admitted “fatigue”. “The war started ten years ago (Editor’s note: in Donbass), the large-scale invasion since 2022, fatigue is manifesting itself both at the individual level and in society,” he told the French daily .
Questioned by the Financial Times on Wagner, Kyrylo Boudanov asserts that this paramilitary group still “exists”, thus rejecting reports according to which this militia has been dismantled. As for its founder and former leader Evgueni Prigojine, 62, died on August 23, 2023 in a plane accident which raises questions – Westerners and Ukraine suspecting involvement of the Kremlin – Kyrylo Boudanov said he wouldn’t “be so quick with conclusions.” The Kremlin denied involvement and said DNA proved Yevgeny Prigozhin was dead. But his body has never been seen publicly. “I am not saying that he is not dead or that he is dead,” Kyrylo Boudanov told FT. “I say there is not a single piece of evidence that he is dead.”
Kyrylo Budanov, who in the past claimed that Vladimir Putin had cancer, says he regularly sees “clones” of the Russian president on television. Asked about the evidence he had to justify the existence of lookalikes, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence replied that his analysts studied “the physiognomy of the ear, the lobes, the distance between the eyebrows, etc.” He adds: “It’s not that difficult. You can easily do it yourself.”