Russia’s war against Ukraine is being waged on many fronts, including the murky one of spying and intelligence gathering. And according to experts, it’s still not going well for Ukraine.
The work of Ukraine’s intelligence services is largely still based on guesswork and hints, rather than facts gleaned from leaked documents and information gathered from military sources, experts have told the Kyiv Post.
Mark Galeotti, a professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University and an expert on transnational crime and Russian security affairs, told the Kyiv Post that when former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was in power the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine was not actively engaged in spying on Russia.
“I suspect that they only retained the assets (agents) they had already recruited, and they certainly continued to do some analytical studies. Likewise, the SBU (the Security Service of Ukraine) hardly tried to resist Russian intelligence penetration, as it was virtually an arm of the Kremlin,” Galeotti said.
The SBU claims that’s changed now. It now often publishes reports about its capture of spies and its preventing acts of sabotage. But the results still aren’t very impressive.
According to the Counterespionage Department of the SBU, in 2014 and so far in 2015 eight criminal cases have been opened against Russian citizens accused of espionage, of which five have gone to court. Two Russians have been convicted of espionage – one of whom was deported to Russia, while the other was sentenced to nine years in prison in Ukraine. Moreover, 13 agents of Russia’s intelligence services have been declared personae non grata in Ukraine for carrying out intelligence gathering under the cover of being staff at Russian diplomatic missions in Ukraine.
On top of that, 70 criminal cases of high treason have been launched against Ukrainian citizens for spying for Russia. However, only six of these have reached the courts: one suspect was found guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, while another got nine years behind bars. The others were released due to a lack of evidence.
Experts claim that Ukrainian intelligence services are hampered by the fact that they effectively became an arm of Russia’s own intelligence services when the government was solidly pro-Russian.
And in his 2014 article “Why Russia is Winning the Intelligence War in Ukraine,” Galeotti wrote that Ukrainian intelligence’s estimates of the numbers of pro-Russian separatist troops and the amount of weapons they have acquired from Russia were than still frequently little more than guesswork.
Meanwhile, Moscow still has a big advantage over Kyiv when it comes to intelligence – the Ukrainian communications and command structures have been thoroughly penetrated by Russian agents – and the Kremlin is using this advantage to the full.
Ukraine has had some notable successes though. In one high-profile case, Ukraine detained two Russian special ops soldiers after a shoot-out in Luhansk Oblast in May.
Yevgeny Yerofeyev, the commander of a GRU (Russian military intelligence) squad and Sergeant Alexander Alexandrov, who were arrested near the city Schastia, are a rare intelligence goldmine for Ukraine’s spymasters, and have provided proof of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.
“There are many Russians soldiers and citizens under arrest in Ukraine,” Yerofeyev has told Ukrainian intelligence, and the Ukrainian and Russian media.
“I and Sasha (Alexandrov) are not alone behind bars (in Ukraine). It’s just that we became famous because of the information reported in the media,” Yerofeyev said in an interview with Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Mykola Malomuzh, the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (2005-2010) and a former intelligence service adviser to Yanukovych (2010-2013), confirmed to the Kyiv Post that after the ousted former president came to power, the Ukrainian intelligence services had ceased operations against Russia.
“(Yanukovych) set a course for full cooperation with Russia. That meant all our intelligence services were forbidden from collecting information and spying on Russia. And the SBU, which was supposed to catch separatists and terrorists, almost completely stopped its monitoring in eastern Ukraine, and in Crimea too,” Malomuzh said.
He said Ukrainian spies in Russia had lost their asset network and had effectively ceased to operate.
Meanwhile, international cooperation with the Russian special services was implemented under international bilateral agreements. According to these, the treaty parties were obliged not to spy on each other.
But Malomuzh said that after the EuroMaidan revolution the Ukrainian intelligence services started to change. Experienced workers who had been dismissed from the intelligence services under Yanukovych returned to reform them. They reactivated the agent network in Crimea, and even gleaned intelligence about the peninsula’s annexation before it happened.
“Unfortunately, the leadership than ignored these facts. No state of emergency was imposed. I can say that this was a huge intelligence failure,” said Malomuzh.
Galeotti sees the improvements made in the Ukrainian intelligence services this year. “Frankly speaking, the Ukrainian intelligence services were still in a pretty shambolic state last year. But since then, the SBU and SZRU have come along a great deal, both in terms of traditional trade craft and also the innovative use of social media and the like as intelligence tools,” told Galeotti to Kyiv Post.
Kyiv Post writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached at [email protected].
