Serious special operation or bad spy movie plot? That’s the question at the center of Ukraine’s latest scandal.
It includes claims that the country’s security agencies plotted a passenger jet hijacking, an intriguing international conspiracy, and even allegations of treason in the highest ranks of the government.
At the center of the scandal are 33 Russian nationals who were arrested in Belarus in July. The Belarusian authorities claimed that they were mercenaries with the Kremlin-backed private military contractor Wagner Group, many of whom had formerly fought against Ukraine with Russian-backed militants in the Donbas. They had arrived in Belarus to destabilize the situation in the country during a controversial presidential election campaign, Minsk claimed, but provided no evidence.
Ukraine asked the Belarusian government to extradite the men to Kyiv to stand trial. Instead, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko handed the militants over to Moscow on Aug. 14, supposedly in return for the Kremlin’s support amid mass protests against election fraud in Belarus.
Then, just days after the transfer, Ukrainian media reported that the mercenaries’ entire missions had actually been part of a Ukrainian covert operation to ensnare the militants and bring them to Ukraine. And it had failed spectacularly.
Was that really true? Virtually every official allegedly involved denies that the plan ever existed. And some experts have also cast doubt on the story.
A Russian-backed militant guards a barricade in the city of Donetsk on April 15, 2014. (AFP)
The mission
On Aug. 18, Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov asserted that Ukraine’s SBU security service and the Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence had started planning the operation against Wagner as far back as a year ago.
According to him, the idea was to locate and arrest 28 individuals living in Russia, some of whom were involved in shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 in the sky over Donbas in 2014, as well as downing Ukrainian Air Force Ilyushin Il-76 and Antonov An-26 planes near the city of Luhansk. All of them had previously fought in Donbas, and at least 9 had Ukrainian passports.
Under the plan, Ukrainian secret service operators pretending to be Russian-based private military company MAR (which was actually disbanded in 2018) offered them a job as c0ntractors ensuring the security of oil refineries in Venezuela.
The fake company managed to hire 33 men, including all of the 28 militants wanted by Ukraine, according to Butusov. Most of the men had never had any previous ties to the real Wagner Group, the Kremlin-sponsored mercenary army involved in action in Ukraine, Syria, Lybia, Sudan and the Central African Republic.
As part of its journey to Venezuela, the militant group was supposed to be transported to Istanbul via Minsk, Belarus on July 25 on a commercial passenger flight. During the flight, an SBU agent posing as a passenger was supposed to simulate an epileptic seizure to force the aircraft to make an emergency landing in Ukraine. Then, the mercenaries would be arrested by the SBU’s special Alpha task force, and the plane would fly onward to Turkey.
However, on the eve of the operation on July 24, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Vasyl Burba reported on the plan during a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials, and Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak objected, according to Butusov.
Yermak reportedly demanded that the operation be delayed until July 30, as it could derail the upcoming ceasefire in Donbas, which was due to enter into force on July 27. Zelensky, despite fierce protests from intelligence officials, supported Yermak and ordered that the operation be halted.
As a result, the militants in Belarus were transported to a recreational base outside of Minsk to wait for another flight to Istambul on July 30. However, on July 29, they were suddenly spotted and detained by Belarusian authorities — which effectively derailed the Ukrainian plan.
On Aug. 3, military intelligence head Burba reported to Zelensky on the operation’s failure and demanded that all officials informed about the plan, including he himself, undergo a lie detector interrogation to determine if they had committed treason, according to Butusov.
Zelensky sacked Burba the next day without providing an explanation why. Then, he initiated talks with Lukashenko on the militants’ extradition to Ukraine. Those also failed on Aug. 15, as the Belarusian dictator sent them all to Moscow.
Lukashenko went on to have phone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the “security situation” in Belarus, which is witnessing ongoing mass protests against the dictator’s rule.
On Aug. 6, Russian pro-Kremlin media outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda called the Wagner case a “provocation” staged by the Ukrainian secret services.
In his report, Butusov effectively accused Yermak of high treason in favor of Russia and of sabotaging the operation to avoid irritating the Kremlin during the Donbas ceasefire talks.
Then, on Aug. 18, journalist Yanina Sokolova published a video reportedly featuring recorded phone conversations in which SBU agents interviewed Wagner militants for the job in Venezuela. Two of the three recruits mentioned in the video, Denys Kharitonov and Sergey Shcherbakov, were also on the list of the 33 arrested mercenaries published by the Belarusian authorities.
The report caused a stir in Ukraine’s media, but some cast doubts on details of the story and considered it far too implausible to be real.
Many observers, particularly Roman Burko of the international online group InformNapalm, which tracks Russian military activities worldwide, noted that the industry of private military contracting in Russia is tightly controlled the Russian intelligence services. For Ukraine’s SBU, it would be extremely difficult to recruit over 30 mercenaries without being stopped.
He also cast doubt on the idea that Turkish intelligence would not have picked up on plans to transport the mercenaries through Istanbul.
“How could it be that Turkish special services combating Russian Wagner mercenaries in Libya would be simply scratching their heads as the whole platoon of (mercenaries) was being transported to them?” Burko also said in his Aug. 19 Facebook post challenging the story.
“And if they wanted to land the aircraft in Ukraine, did they even think that the platoon of trained killers could have taken the passengers hostage?”
Russian-backed militants take aim at a check-point in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk on June 3, 2014.
Both Ukrainian secret agencies mentioned by journalists strongly denied their role in the Wagner ordeal and even said that the plan had never existed.
“Only a poorly informed person could believe in the tale claiming that naive militants could be deceitfully lured in Minsk,” the new military intelligence chief, Colonel Kyrylo Budanov, asserted late on Aug. 18.
“All these so-called private military companies work under the command of the Russian security apparatus and never do anything without their consent or coordination. Even if they work with ‘private’ contracts.”
He also alleged that the narrative about the special operation had been promoted by Russia and its agents of influence in Ukraine.
On Aug. 19, the SBU also decried the report and the recruitment interview recordings, calling them “a regular fake” and “an imaginary script.”
In a statement, it denied that its operatives had taken part in the phone conversations and said that “describing one of the speakers as ‘an SBU officer’ is fiction and manipulation.”
Finally, Chief of Staff Yermak also denied the veracity of the plan and his role in it.
“This looks like a well-thought-out and planned disinformation campaign,” he told the Liviy Bereg media outlet on July 19.
“It can be assumed that some forces in the country decided to exploit this disinformation campaign against Ukraine for their own goals on the cusp of (local) elections (due to take place on Oct. 25). Or maybe someone really wants to derail the ceasefire in Donbas, which has held since July 27 and during which we haven’t lost a single Ukrainian warrior.”
