You're reading: Russia’s spies continue to inflict damage on Ukraine

As Russia’s war against Ukraine bulldozes into its second year with continued shelling and artillery fire, authorities defending the homeland face another, at-times invisible enemy: informants and collaborators who want the Russian-separatist forces to win.

On June 17, a woman living on Ukrainian-controlled territory in Donetsk Oblast was arrested for feeding information to Kremlin-backed forces on Ukrainian troop movements – the second such documented case in a month.

The suspect, a resident of the village of Mironivsky identified only by her nickname, Mala, had allegedly been providing separatist forces with crucial information for about four months, information that allowed them to stage successful attacks. She had been doing so at the request of her cousin, identified as Ruslan Gordienko, a separatist fighter.

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“Shortly after her announcements about the positions of Ukrainian forces, attacks were carried out from Debatlseve using heavy artillery. Afterwards, Gordei (Gordienko) phoned her to ask whether or not the targets were successfully hit. So for the separatists, she was both an informant and an artillery spotter,” Vyacheslav Abroskin, Donetsk Oblast police chief, wrote on Facebook on June 18.

The case of Mala follows a similar case from late May, when a middle-aged man in Krasnoarmiysk was arrested for selling information on troop movements.

 

Ukrainian soldiers detain a man suspected of spying for Russian-backed militants at a checkpoint near Debaltseve in Donetsk Oblast on Aug. 16. (AFP)

Oleksiy Melnyk, a military expert at the Kyiv-based think tank Razumkov Center, said such collaborators posed a huge threat to Ukraine’s fight against the separatists.

“This is critical. In this latest case, this was a woman who absolutely did not arouse any suspicions. But it turns out she was fulfilling a major anti-Ukrainian function for the enemy,” he said.

“The front line has now moved further into Ukrainian territory, it has turned into a dividing line between families, between friends,” he said, calling it a “natural phenomenon” that some people would wind up being sympathetic towards the separatists.

The presence of collaborators, informants and spotters in divided territories in the war-torn east is a major cause of paranoia among Ukrainian forces. Top officials in Ukrainian law enforcement have repeatedly warned of collaborators among their ranks, but the spy network has sucked in ordinary residents as well.

Ilya Kiva, the deputy police chief of Donetsk Oblast, told the Kyiv Post that the separatists’ reliance on collaborators had been constant throughout the entire conflict – and he believed Russian security services were behind it.

“Without a doubt,” he said, “the Russian security services are involved. These separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk – they’re not smart enough to do this on their own. The entire conflict in Donbas is a result of invasion by Russian authorities.”

“It’s obvious there has been an outbreak (of collaborators) lately,” he said, likening them to the plague. He said he couldn’t provide a figure of how many collaborators have been caught so far, but that at least a handful of them surface every month.

“Everything that is connected with separatism in one way or another is a threat not only to Ukraine, but to the whole world. Separatism and terrorism – these things do not carry a flag, they don’t have specific territory. It’s a plague, a cancer in our world. Whether we like it or not, we have to get rid of it,” he said.

In addition to ordinary residents, Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly expressed fears that Russian spies had managed to infiltrate various government agencies – including the Security Service.

Ousted President Viktor Yanukovych is believed to have stolen stacks of state secrets before fleeing to Russia last year. Oleksandr Yakymenko, the former head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, turned up in Russia shortly after this, along with several other high-ranking intelligence officers.

Melnyk of the Razumkov Center said there was plenty of reason to believe that Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies were littered with Russian-separatist sympathizers, noting that the Yanukovych era had seen an unprecedented number of Russians appointed to high-ranking positions.

“I’m sure there are plenty of cases of officials with separatist sympathies that never make it into the press,” he said.

Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security services, noted that while there had been progress in rooting out separatist sympathizers in Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies over the past year, many government agencies “are still substantially compromised.”

“The level of penetration not just by the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) and GRU (Russian Military Intelligence Division), but even by the Russian Interior Ministry, a culture of fraternalism among many in the Ukrainian security community, and the assiduous efforts of the Russians to restore networks means that this will be a long-term process,” he said.

Galeotti said Russian intelligence officers have spread their tentacles across Ukraine in “a wide range of information gathering, subversion and sabotage missions,” using “multiple, parallel networks run by the FSB and GRU.”

“There are sympathizers who provide intelligence or more tangible services out of commitment, and others who do it for the money, but the point is that Moscow is absolutely seeking both to expand these networks and also to use them in a variety of ways to undermine the Ukrainian government war effort,” he said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Allison Quinn can be reached at [email protected].