’During the war, the Security Service (of Ukraine) has become a combat-ready special service – one of the key elements of our Defence and Security Forces – protecting the country from internal threats and delivering important results both at the front and behind enemy lines’, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 25 March, on the Day of the Security Service of Ukraine.
According to an official statement by the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) on 3 April, it has gathered an evidence base on Ukrainian traitors who are attempting to implement Putin’s idea of external governance in Ukraine. The SSU said the illegal group includes traitors, collaborators and other supporters of the so-called ’Russian world’ who fled to Russia before the full-scale war began. On 27 March, the group’s leaders and other Ukrainians took part in an event in Moscow which was also attended by ideologist Aleksandr Dugin, members of the State Duma and bloggers. The SSU claims that the forum’s rhetoric focused on promoting Putin’s claim that lasting peace in Ukraine can only be achieved by creating an interim administration under the control of Russia and the United States to temporarily govern the country. After establishing an anti-Ukrainian hub in Moscow, the group received instructions from their Russian handlers to set up their own branches in EU countries as alternatives to Ukraine’s diplomatic missions.
This case is just one of the recent successes achieved by the Security Service of Ukraine, which highlights the wide range of its activities: the SSU is able to collect information both in Ukraine and abroad, tracking the activities of both hostile political circles and bloggers groups, used as agents of influence in the communications space.
In addition to the abovementioned case, the SSU has recently achieved a number of remarkable successes not only in the counterintelligence field, but also in its counterterrorism operations and in the sphere of economic security. The question arises: is the situation really that clear?
To draw attention to both anomalies and controversial achievements, we offer below a selection of individual cases addressing the questions as follows.
Where are the ’red lines’ for intelligence agencies of an EU candidate country?
Do Kyiv’s principles and the EU’s values match?
How do you stop an intelligence agency that has been turned into a killing machine?
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In early February, Armen Sarkisian, suspected organiser of anti-Maidan provocateurs (so-called ’titushky’), was killed in an explosion at a housing complex in Moscow. During the Yanukovych era, a native of now-occupied Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast, Sarkisian was an influential criminal boss nicknamed ’Armen Horlivskyi’. 44-year-old Sarkisian was wanted since 2014. Despite the fact that the Ukrainian security services have not claimed responsibility for the incident, there remains little doubt concerning their involvement.
Also in February, the SSU reported that a Russian FSB mole has been exposed within its ranks: the chief of staff at the SSU’s Anti-Terrorist Centre, Colonel Dmytro Koziura. The Head of the Security Service Vasyl Maliuk was personally a member of the operational and investigative group that was evaluating the traitor, and he led the operation to detain him on 12 February. ’The Security Service’s self-purification continues.’, Maliuk said. The investigation revealed that the traitor was recruited by the FSB in 2018 in Vienna. For some time, Russian supervisors ’preserved’ the suspect for security reasons, and he did not carry out active espionage activities. However, at the end of December last year, the FSB resumed contact with him. The SSU discovered a covert channel of communication between the spy and the Russian intelligence service. The mole used a safe house in Kyiv to communicate with a resident of the Russian special service. He received a special mobile phone, a Wi-Fi router and a SIM card, which he used to covertly transmit information collected for the Russian FSB, including documents containing state secrets.
The series of successes continued – in early March, the SSU arrested a senior State Space Agency (Derzhkosmos) official working as an FSB agent for Russia. He allegedly gathered classified data on the locations of Ukraine’s strategic military-industrial sites. Law enforcement says Russia’s Federal Security Service recruited the official in 2024 through his wife, who lives in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and collaborates with local authorities. The agent’s tasks included collecting and passing classified information to the FSB, which Russia hoped to use for airstrikes on Ukraine. He planned to flee to Russia after retiring in 2025.
’The Security Service detained another agent of the Russian military intelligence service (known as the GRU) near Odesa. The man was a resident of unrecognised Transnistria who was trying to obtain secret Ukrainian developments in the field of unmanned systems.’, SSU reported late March. According to the investigation, the man who posed as an entrepreneur who supposedly imported Ukrainian food products was tasked with recruiting a soldier of the Ukrainian defence forces who works with drones. In return for a monetary reward, he planned to use the soldier to obtain technical documentation on the latest strike and reconnaissance UAVs. Law enforcement officers detained him red-handed when he was receiving a flash drive with classified data on Ukrainian drones.
For many, the cases above may indicate that the Security Service of Ukraine has indeed achieved significant results. So, it is time to move on to an example that raises some questions.
According to the SSU’s press release on 1 February, a Russian agent from Lviv was arrested in Kyiv who was planning to detonate explosives in central Kyiv near an SSU facility. SSU operatives caught the suspect red-handed as she retrieved a bag of explosives from a hiding place and headed back to her rented flat. The case materials show that Russian operatives had remotely recruited a 22-year-old drug addict girl from Lviv who was looking for quick money on Telegram.
According to another press release issued by the SSU on 2 April, the SSU counterintelligence department, in cooperation with the National Police, has caught two Russian assets red-handed as they attempted to blow up an administrative building of a local police station in Lviv. Investigators have determined that the suspects agreed to carry out the task on the instructions of a Russian representative in exchange for a monetary reward. Following instructions received via the Telegram messaging app, the suspects arrived in Lviv and retrieved explosives hidden in a bag at specific coordinates. The defendants – a 21-year-old young man and a 22-year-old young lady from Kyiv – were set to plant the concealed explosives in an administrative building at a Lviv police station as part of their prearranged plan.
The situation is not absolutely clear, but the information available suggests that the two releases concern the same case and the SSU presented a planned terrorist attack in Lviv in April as a newly detected and prevented criminal act, rather than as part of a case uncovered a couple of months earlier.
This example clearly shows how difficult it is to judge the cridibility of the special services. It should be noted that, just like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian intelligence services do not seem to be concerned about being perceived as credible organisations either, but rather are busy with justifying their activities. Ukraine’s special services operate under direct contol of the President, who himself is only concerned with convincing the Ukrainian people and Western supporters that he can still be trusted and, as long as he is doing a good job, he deserves to remain in power.
As for the SSU, it is worth noting that, it is an special service with 30,000 employees. In the last decades, there have been several attempts by the West to persuade Kyiv to cut both the number of SSU staff and the range of tasks, but these efforts have met with little success. Despite calls from the EU and NATO, the SSU has changed little over the years; in fact, existing problems within the service, such as corruption, use of violence, illegal wiretappings and politically motivated operations, have become even more acute following Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022.
Considering recent attacks Ukraine has been involved in, such as the attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines (2022) and the murder of Daria Dugina (2022) and Armen Sarkisian (2025), it can be stated that, the activities and ’values’ of the SSU and other Ukrainian special services are in stark contrast to European values.
Given all this, it is worth finally wondering whether Ukrainian law enforcement agencies can be deterred from carrying out bloody attacks both in Ukraine and elsewhere. For the time being, the answer to this question is still unknown. However, despite all the ’red lines’ Ukraine has already crossed, in light of the political developments in Europe, there seems to be nothing left to say but ’Dear SSU, welcome to the EU!’
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