SVIATOHIRSK, Ukraine — Ukraine’s besieged security service is working overtime to catch the enemy from within — a network of Russian saboteurs, collaborators and secret sympathizers — as Moscow’s remorseless offensive gains ground in the east.
Ukraine and Russia have cultural, linguistic, economic and religious ties dating back centuries, so the more than 600-mile front line separating Russian and Ukrainian forces does not mark a neat boundary between pro- and anti-Russian populations.
For a taste of the difficulty divided loyalties can pose, consider the footage from inside an unmarked car by an unseen driver in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The recording shows a man in a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and his face obscured in the passenger seat.
A few seconds into the recording, the anonymous agent gives the go-ahead over the radio to his colleagues: “Let’s get to work,” he says sternly, his right hand resting on the car door.
“Wait a minute,” he tells the driver.
Both agents’ attention is directed about 50 yards away at a man dressed in a dark blue gym suit. His back is turned to them, and he appears oblivious to being watched as he gets into his car.
Before he can turn on the ignition, a dusty green SUV breaks into the video frame, its tires screeching, and parks behind him to block his escape.
Three armed men wearing camouflage attire, balaclavas and bulletproof vests jump out. They apprehend the driver, throw him to the ground and handcuff him.
This video, recorded on Oct. 16, was shared with The Washington Times by one of the agents of the Sluzhba bezpeka Ukrainy — the Ukrainian Security Service, known by its initials SBU — who took part in the arrest.
The investigation summary says the 34-year-old man had “collected and transmitted without authorization … information on the shipment and movement of weapons, armaments and ammunition,” as well as on the “movements or deployment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine … with the possibility of identifying them on the territory … of the Donetsk region, to an employee of the Russian Federation.”
Posing as a volunteer of a group working with the U.N. World Food Program, the man had reportedly been traveling around the besieged Donetsk city of Pokrovsk under the cover of delivering humanitarian aid to residents. Kyiv officials say he was using his position to spy on Ukrainian defenses and troop concentrations and passing the information to the FSB.
Big job
Although the operation was swift and striking, the SBU agents were having an ordinary day at the office.
A simple search on the SBU’s Telegram channel reveals a stark record of the scope of the problem with Russian infiltration. In and around the city of Pokrovsk alone, people suspected of helping Russia are reported to have been arrested on six dates in five weeks ending in mid-October.
Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the sprawling SBU has grown into the country’s primary law enforcement, intelligence and security agency fighting internal and external threats.
Having inherited most of its personnel, equipment and intelligence-gathering capabilities from the Committee for State Security, or KDB, the Soviet-era sister agency to Moscow’s feared KGB, the SBU was initially hampered by corruption, cozy relations with criminal elements and questionable loyalties.
The war against Ukraine’s bigger, better-armed neighbor has made the SBU’s mission, competence and loyalties critical to the government in Kyiv.
Many intelligence networks disintegrated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Moscow cultivated informal ties with Ukrainian security officials before its February 2022 invasion. That infiltration rendered Ukraine’s security apparatus vulnerable to covert and overt operations.
The issue was on full display in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and a Moscow-underwritten separatist rebellion in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region escalated into a full-scale war. That spring, an estimated 90% of the SBU staff in Crimea either resigned or joined the ranks of Russia’s FSB.
“Only 10% of the Crimean SBU employees moved to mainland Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea,” Serhiy Pashinsky, then head of the national parliament’s Committee on National Security and Defense, said at the time.
In the years since, the SBU has undergone reforms and increased cooperation with Western intelligence agencies. It has moved away from the Soviet model and enhanced its accountability and counterintelligence capabilities.
Although the security service has been rebuilt into a modern, well-equipped agency on par with many of its Western counterparts, the issue of Russian infiltration in Ukraine is far from resolved.
Religious divide
The press releases and pictures after each arrest of suspected Russian collaborators indicate that saboteurs and agents are being recruited among all strata of Ukrainian society. Invariably handcuffed and flanked by balaclava-clad SBU agents in bulletproof vests, their faces blurred, the suspects wear civilian clothing, military uniforms and sometimes religious garments.
Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the SBU, said several priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have been cooperating with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, presenting an unusual challenge for security services.
“If someone wearing a cassock via his phone adjusts enemy fire targeting a residential quarter in Luhansk region, what does this have to do with God?” Mr. Maliuk said during a March interview on Ukrainian television. “Can a cassock and some incense serve as an indulgence in this case? Of course, they can’t. We will bring them to justice, like anyone else.”
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the country’s largest ecclesiastical body, has established links to the Moscow Patriarchate. A May 2023 survey published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 82% of Ukrainians did not trust the UOC-MP, and 63% said it should be banned in Ukraine.
The church’s activities were banned in August.
One of the many clergymen recently arrested on suspicion of collaborating with Moscow was the metropolitan, or head cleric, of the Sviatohirsk monastery in the oblast of Donetsk, one of the main holy sites of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine.
On April 24, the SBU accused Metropolitan Arseniy of having “tipped off” Ukrainian military positions in the region to the Russians. According to the investigation, the cleric had given the locations of checkpoints around Kramatorsk during one of his sermons, which was recorded and later posted on the monastery’s website and local Telegram channels.
One monk at the metropolitan’s monastery condemned the arrest as unjust.
“They want to put him in front of a court, but they have no evidence whatsoever to back up their claims,” Father Oleg, a priest of the Sviatohirsk monastery, said in an interview. The priest, a native of Siberia, agreed to speak to a reporter about the ban on the activities of the UOC-MP on the condition that he not be identified by his real name. He cited a fear of “reprisals” from the authorities.
“So far, thank God, no one has come to bother us; they are leaving us alone,” Father Oleg said in a hushed tone as he walked among the monastery’s lush flower beds and shrapnel-riddled chapels.
“We live as our predecessors did over the past centuries,” he said, insisting that he did not “concern [himself] with politics.”
It’s an oft-repeated mantra among the Ukrainian clergymen who once answered to Moscow. Father Oleg said that neither the monastery nor the church at large has anything to do with Russia and its outspokenly pro-war Patriarch Kirill, a close political ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Although the war has severed direct financial and ecumenical links, the clergyman espoused a worldview similar to that told by the Kremlin and Russian state media, seemingly at odds with his professed apolitical stance.
Minutes after insisting to a reporter that all he wished for was “peace, peace at last,” the clergyman offered a conspiracy-laden diatribe interspersed with homophobic, racist and antisemitic observations on the state of the modern world. Holy Russia, he said, stood as the last bastion of White Christianity and traditional values that the morally corrupt West has abandoned.
As for Ukraine’s chances in the war, he said, “Do you know what Bismarck’s last advice to the German people was? Never fight with the Russians.”
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