Exclusive: Sensitive materials obtained by Ukrainian and other security services and reviewed by The Post offers rare insight into the activities of the FSB, Russia's security service that bears enormous responsibility for Moscow's failed war plan.
Kovalenko is a senior officer in an FSB unit — the Ninth Directorate of the Department of Operational Information — whose main purpose has for yearsThe department is overseen by a senior FSB officer, Sergey Beseda, who started his career with the KGB in the late 1970s, according to Ukrainian officials, and was assigned to overseas posts including Cuba before returning to Moscow to head operations in Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics.
that Russia was shifting focus, the official said, from shaping events in Ukraine to plotting “its seizure.” “We relayed all the information that the Americans had shared without any changes,” said a participant. But at the same time, the official said, “our information said that the Russians are not planning war” on such a large scale, and that judgment was given equal weight alongside the CIA warnings.
Elsewhere, Ukraine’s spies came upon a scene of disciplinary mayhem: lines of stranded Russian vehicles accompanied by troops who had bartered fuel and other supplies for alcohol. “A lot of them were drunk,” said a Ukrainian official who reviewed reports on what Ukraine’s spies had witnessed. “We didn’t envision … some classic invasion in Second World War style with tanks, artillery and infantry,” a senior Ukrainian security official said. Ukraine was wrong about Russia’s intentions, he said, but even Moscow may not have envisioned a major land war.In an interview this month with The Post, Zelensky said that well before the invasion, Russia had been waging “a hybrid war against our state. There was an energy blow, there was a political blow.
Ukraine has made repeated attempts to cleanse its ranks of Russian assets, at one point even enlisting a CIA officer to serve as an internal adviser on rooting out FSB penetrations, according to former U.S. officials. But with an estimated 27,000 employees — making the SBU at least five times as large as MI5, its British equivalent — the agency has struggled to surmount the problem.“Is there treachery? What can I say?” Zelensky said. “With all my love for Ukraine, we are not without sin.
Bakanov did not respond to requests for comment. Kulinich, Sivkovich and Naumov could not be reached for comment, and none appears to have made any public statement about the allegations against them.
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