The newspaper The Washington Post (WP) writes that the intelligence services of Ukraine have been developing new ties with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for almost a decade — since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014. According to the publicationʼs sources, since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to help Ukrainian intelligence.
The US Central Intelligence Agency provided Ukraine with advanced surveillance systems, trained recruits in Ukraine and in the US, built new headquarters for Ukrainian military intelligence and exchanged intelligence with them. According to American officials, the CIA still maintains a significant presence in Kyiv.
Cooperation of the CIA with SBU
According to the WP sources, the CIA was working on the creation of a completely new department in the the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which was isolated from other departments of SBU.
The new unit was called the "Fifth Directorate", thus separating it from the four already existing units of SBU. Since then, a sixth agency has been added — according to WP interlocutors, it works with Britainʼs foreign intelligence service, MI6.
Cooperation of the CIA with MDI
In addition to the creation of a new SBU department, the CIA cooperated with Ukrainian military intelligence. Starting in 2015, the CIA began a large-scale transformation of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (MDI).
"We calculated that MDI was a smaller and more nimble organization where we could have more impact," a former US intelligence official who worked in Ukraine told WP.
"MDI was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training. The MDI officers were young guys, not Soviet-era KGB generals [...], while the SBU was too big to reform," he added.
However, according to the publicationʼs sources, the US warnings about a full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 were based on separate intelligence data that was not initially reported to Ukraine.
Ukraineʼs own intelligence efforts fueled the Ukrainian governmentʼs skepticism about Putinʼs plans, as Ukrainians were listening in on the Russian military and FSB units, who only learned of the full-scale war the day before.
"They were getting an accurate picture from people who were also in the dark," a US official told reporters.
New details of the murder of Daria Dugina
Journalists of The Washington Post learned new details of the murder of the daughter of the ideologue of the "Russian Peace" Daria Dugina. The publication claims that the Security Service of Ukraine is behind this.
According to WP sources, Ukrainian operatives had installed a hidden compartment in the pet carrier, according to security officials with knowledge of the operation, and used it to conceal components of a bomb. The cluttered car carrying a mother and her 12-year-old daughter seemed barely worth the attention of Russian security officials as it approached a border checkpoint. But the least conspicuous piece of luggage — a crate for a cat — was part of an elaborate, lethal plot.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia called 42-year-old Natalia Vovk the main suspect. According to the FSB, she entered Russia from Estonia in July 2022 and rented an apartment in the same residential complex as Dugina.
Ukraine authorities said Vovk was motivated in part by Russia’s siege of her home city, Mariupol. They declined to comment on the nature of her relationship to the SBU or her current whereabouts.
American spies on participation in operations to eliminate enemies of Ukraine
U.S. intelligence officials stressed that the agency has had no involvement in targeted killing operations by Ukrainian agencies, and that its work has focused on bolstering those services’ abilities to gather intelligence on a dangerous adversary.
The Washington Post claims that the "deadly" operations of Ukrainian intelligence officers have complicated their cooperation with the CIA and caused concern among some officials in Kyiv and Washington.
"If Ukraine’s intelligence operations become even bolder — targeting Russians in third countries, for example — you could imagine how that might cause rifts with partners and come into serious tension with Ukraine’s broader strategic goals," a CIA exposé told reporters. According to him, membership in NATO and the EU is among these goals.
"We never involved our international partners in covert operations, especially behind the front lines. SBU and MDI operatives were not accompanied by CIA counterparts. Ukraine avoided using weapons or equipment that could be traced to U.S. sources, and even covert funding streams were segregated,” said a former high-ranking representative of the Defense Forces of Ukraine.
- In April, The Washington Post, referring to a secret report of the US National Security Agency, wrote that the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense Kyrylo Budanov planned to strike deep in the Russian rear on the anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Russia, but the attack was postponed due to the concerns of officials in Washington.