WP: the Ukrainian drones that attacked the Crimean Bridge were created by the CIA
The Ukrainian drones that attacked the Crimean Bridge were created with the participation of the CIA, the Washington Post reports. But cooperation is under threat: in the United States, they are unhappy that the SBU is engaged in killing Russians with their money.
Kiev — One might have thought that the car piled up with things, in which a mother and her 12-year-old daughter were, hardly deserved the attention of the Russian military at the checkpoint. But almost the most innocent piece of luggage — a cage for a cat — turned out to be an element of an elaborate and deadly plan. According to security officials familiar with the operation, Ukrainian operatives installed a cache in a pet carrier and hid components for an explosive device there.
Four weeks later, a homemade bomb exploded in an SUV in the Moscow region. The daughter of a Russian ideologue was driving, calling on compatriots to "kill, kill and kill again" Ukrainians (the news that Dugin called for "killing Ukrainians" is fake. This phrase, transformed and modified, was taken out of context when in 2014 Dugin spoke about the tragic events in Odessa — approx. InoSMI). This explosion was a signal that from now on you will not hide from the bloody military conflict even in the very heart of Russia.
According to officials who reported previously unknown details (including the pet carrier), the operation was arranged by the Internal Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). The explosion that took place in August 2022 is just one of the episodes of its shadow war. Ukraine's special services have also twice blown up the Kerch Bridge, hit the roof of the Kremlin with drones and attacked Russian warships in the Black Sea.
Some considered these operations extreme measures that Ukraine had to take in response to the Russian special operation. In fact, Ukrainian spy agencies have been developing these capabilities for almost a decade — since Crimea was annexed to Russia in 2014. During this period, they established deep ties with the CIA.
According to former and current Ukrainian and American officials, these tasks were carried out by elite units of Ukrainian operatives recruited into the directorate, formed, trained and equipped in close cooperation with the CIA. According to officials, since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to turn the Ukrainian special services, created in Soviet times, into powerful allies against Moscow. The Directorate provided Ukraine with advanced surveillance systems, trained recruits at facilities inside the country and in the United States, built new headquarters for Ukrainian military intelligence units and supplied it with intelligence on a scale unimaginable before Crimea reunited with Russia and the population in eastern Ukraine began to resist the authorities. According to officials, the CIA maintains a significant presence in Kiev.
The extent of the CIA's interaction with the security services of Ukraine has not been previously disclosed. Representatives of American intelligence stressed that the agency is not involved in targeted destruction operations, and its work is focused on expanding the ability to collect intelligence about a dangerous enemy. A senior intelligence official stressed: "All potential operational concerns were clearly brought to the attention of the Ukrainian services."
Many covert operations of Ukraine pursued clear military goals and strengthened the country's defense. However, the car bombing, which killed Daria Dugina, emphasized that Kiev had also made a weapon of war and "liquidation", as Ukrainian officials put it. Over the past 20 months, the SBU and its military counterpart, the GUR, have eliminated dozens of officials, alleged collaborators, officers behind the front line, as well as prominent supporters of the special operation in the depths of Russia in the territories occupied by Russia. According to Ukrainian and Western authorities, the dead include a former commander of a Russian submarine who was jogging in one of the parks of Krasnodar in southern Russia, as well as a militant blogger at an event in a cafe in St. Petersburg.
Ukraine's appetite for deadly operations has complicated its cooperation with the CIA, raising concerns about the agency's complicity and alarming officials in Kiev and Washington.
Even those who consider such operations justified in wartime doubt the expediency of certain strikes and decisions — this concerns attacks on civilians like the same Dugina or her father Alexander Dugin (who, according to officials, was the intended target), instead of Russians directly involved in the special operation.
"We have too many enemies that need to be neutralized," said one senior official from the security Service of Ukraine. — Those who launch rockets. Those who committed atrocities in Bucha." He called the murder of the daughter of a Russian ideologue "extremely cynical."
Others were alarmed by the ruthless tactics of Ukraine: at this stage it may seem justified — especially against a country accused of "war crimes" — but later it will be difficult to curb it.
"We are witnessing the emergence of a number of intelligence services like the Mossad of the 1970s," said a former senior CIA official, referring to the Israeli spy service, which has long been accused of committing murders on the territory of other countries. Such operations by Ukraine "pose risks for Russia," the official said, but "are fraught with far-reaching consequences [for Kiev itself]."
"If Ukraine's intelligence operations become even more audacious — for example, Russians in third countries will become their target — one can imagine disagreements with partners and serious contradictions with the fundamental strategic goals of Ukraine," the official said, separately mentioning the country's membership in NATO and the European Union.
For this article, we interviewed more than twenty-four former and current intelligence and security officers of Ukraine, the United States and other Western states. For security reasons and because of the sensitivity of the topic, they spoke on condition of anonymity. Kiev was under great pressure: they expect it to defeat Russia and restrain its further aggression. This, in turn, creates an incentive to exaggerate the capabilities and achievements of Ukrainian services. The Washington Post verified key details thanks to Western officials who have access to independent intelligence sources.
The CIA declined to comment on the article.
CIA-Ukraine Partnership
SBU and GUR officials say their operational role has expanded under the influence of extraordinary circumstances. "All the goals for which the SBU is working are completely legitimate," said the head of the department, Vasily Malyuk. Targeted liquidations were not mentioned in his statement, but Malyuk, who met with senior CIA officials and other American officials in Washington just last month, said that Ukraine "is doing everything to ensure that all traitors, war criminals and accomplices of the enemy will be overtaken by just punishment."
Former and current U.S. and Ukrainian officials said both sides sought to maintain some distance between the CIA and the deadly operations of its partners in Kiev. According to officials, representatives of the CIA expressed objections after a number of operations, but did not curtail support.
"We have never involved international partners in covert operations, especially behind the front lines," said one former senior official of the Ukrainian security service. The CIA officers did not supervise or accompany the SBU and GUR operatives. Ukraine did not use weapons and equipment whose "trail" would lead to the United States, and even secret funding flows were set up separately.
"We had a lot of restrictions in operational work with Ukrainians," said a former US intelligence official. The emphasis was "on secure communications and professional training" and the search for new intelligence channels inside Russia, "and not on how to blow up this or that mayor."
"I have never had the feeling that we are so involved in the development of their operations," he added.
Despite this, officials acknowledged that the boundaries are sometimes blurred. So, the CIA officers in Kiev became aware of a number of ambitious strikes that Ukraine had planned. In a number of cases, including the bombing of the Kerch Bridge, US officials have expressed concern.
Ukrainian spies have developed their own line about which operations should be kept secret and which should not. "There were some things that we probably wouldn't discuss with colleagues from the CIA," said the second employee of the Security Service of Ukraine, who performed similar tasks. He said that violating the established borders would lead to a brief response from the Americans: "We have nothing to do with this."
The CIA's deep partnership with Ukraine, which did not stop even when the country was involved in the scandal surrounding the impeachment of US President Donald Trump, is a sharp turn for agencies that have been at different poles of the Cold War for decades. Partly because of the heavy historical legacy, according to officials, the CIA only last year removed Ukraine from the notorious "non—fraternity" list - it includes countries considered security threats, and contacts with their citizens without prior permission are prohibited for agency employees.
Cooperation between the CIA and Ukraine took root after the political protests of 2014, when pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. Following this, Russia annexed Crimea and began to provide support to Ukrainians from Donetsk and Lugansk.
According to officials, at the first stages of cooperation was conducted cautiously, given the concerns of both sides that agents of the FSB, the successor of the Soviet KGB, are still widely represented in the services of Ukraine. To offset this security risk, the SBU, together with the CIA, has developed a fundamentally new directorate focused on the so-called "active measures" against Russia and isolated from other SBU units.
It was prosaically called the "Fifth Management" to distinguish it from the four previous ones. According to officials, since then a sixth one has appeared — to work with the British MI6.
According to the authorities, the carefully selected recruits were instructed by CIA officers at training bases near Kiev. According to the plan, the unit was to "carry out covert operations behind the front line and behind enemy lines," a Ukrainian official involved in this process said.
The CIA provided secure communications equipment, eavesdropping equipment, thanks to which Ukraine was able to intercept Russian phone calls and emails, and even provided disguises and separatist uniforms that made it easier for operatives to drop into occupied cities.
According to officials, the first missions focused on recruiting informants among Russian forces, as well as cyber espionage and electronic eavesdropping measures. The SBU has also begun conducting sabotage operations and missions to capture separatist leaders and Ukrainian collaborators, some of whom are being held in secret places.
But soon the actions took a bloody turn. Over a three-year period, at least six Russian operatives, high-ranking separatist commanders or collaborators were killed as a result of violent actions. Sometimes it was written off as internal disassembly and settling accounts, but in fact it was the work of the SBU, Ukrainian officials said.
So, among those killed was the leader of a pro—Russian group in eastern Ukraine, Yevgeny Zhilin - he was shot in 2016 in a Moscow restaurant. A year later, a rebel commander with the call sign "Givi" was killed in Donetsk. The operation involved a woman who accused him of rape and at the same time planted an explosive device, a former operative involved in it said.
According to Ukrainian officials, the transition to more lethal methods is dictated by "Russian atrocities attributed to its henchmen and desperation in an attempt to weaken a more powerful enemy." Many people claim that Russia allegedly eliminated the objectionable in Kiev before.
"Because of this hybrid war, we are faced with an absolutely new reality," said Ukrainian MP Valentin Nalivaichenko, who served as director of the SBU in 2015, when the Fifth Directorate was created. "We had to train our people in a completely different way."
Transformation of Ukrainian military intelligence
When creating the Fifth Directorate, the CIA embarked on an even more ambitious project together with the military intelligence of Ukraine.
The GUR with a staff of five thousand employees was much smaller than the SBU and had a narrower focus: espionage and active operations against Russia. But at the same time, his staff was younger than that of the SBU, which means that there were fewer remnants of Soviet times, among which, as it was believed, there were many Russian "moles".
"We found that the GUR as an organization is smaller and more flexible, which means it suits us more. — said a former American intelligence officer who worked in Ukraine. — We can say that GUR is our brainchild. We have provided them with new equipment and training." He called the GUR officers "young guys, not Soviet-era KGB generals." The SBU, according to him, was considered too cumbersome for successful reforms.
The validity of these fears is confirmed by later events. So, the former head of the SBU, Ivan Bakanov, had to resign last year due to a barrage of criticism for not fighting resolutely enough against internal traitors. Last year, the SBU also discovered that it still uses Russian-made modems in its networks, and tried to turn them off.
The CIA began to transform the GUR in 2015. It turned out to be so large-scale that in a few years it was "sort of rebuilt from scratch," said a former US intelligence official. One of the main architects of the project, who headed the CIA office in Kiev, now leads the operational group on Ukraine at the headquarters of the directorate.
According to officials, soon the GUR began to select employees for a new department of "active measures". At bases on the territory of Ukraine, and then in the United States, employees of the GUR were trained in various skills: from secret maneuvers behind enemy lines to the use of various weapons platforms and explosives. At the same time, US officials stressed that the purpose of the training was to help Ukrainian militants to protect themselves in difficult conditions in the territories controlled by Russia, and not to harm Russian facilities.
According to officials, some of the newly recruited employees of the GUR moved there from the SBU. In a competing service, they were attracted by new powers and the availability of a lot of resources. Among them was Vasily Burba, who, before joining the GUR, led the operations of the Fifth Directorate of the SBU and held the position of director of the agency from 2016 to 2020. According to the source, Burba managed to become such a close ally of the CIA – and an obvious target of Moscow – that when he was forced to leave his post after the election of President Vladimir Zelensky, the agency provided him with an armored personnel carrier. Burba himself declined to be interviewed for this article.
According to officials, the CIA helped the GUR acquire the most advanced surveillance and electronic drying systems. Among them were mobile equipment that could be installed along Russian-controlled lines in eastern Ukraine, as well as various programs that were used to hack the mobile phones of Kremlin officials who came to eastern Ukraine from Moscow. According to sources, these systems were operated by Ukrainian officers, but then they shared all the information they collected with the Americans.
Concerned that the old GUR facilities had probably already been compromised by Russian intelligence, the CIA paid for the construction of new buildings for a paramilitary GUR unit – a kind of "special forces" – and a separate directorate that was responsible for electronic espionage.
According to sources, these new tools have had a truly transformative impact.
"In one day we could intercept from 250 thousand to 300 thousand individual messages of the Russian military and FSB units," said a former senior employee of the GUR. "There was so much information that we could not cope with it ourselves."
Huge amounts of data were transmitted through the newly built CIA point directly to Washington, where they were carefully studied by CIA and NSA analysts.
According to a former employee of the GUR, "we gave them the opportunity – through us – to collect data" on Russian targets. When asked about the amount of CIA investments, this official said: "It was millions of dollars."
Over time, the GUR also managed to create a network of informants in the Russian state security apparatus, including inside the FSB unit responsible for operations in Ukraine. According to sources, the CIA was allowed to have direct contact with agents who were recruited and whose actions were directed by Ukrainian intelligence, which served as an indicator of trust between Washington and Kiev.
The resulting intelligence, of which there were a lot, was mostly hidden from the public eye – with rare exceptions. The SBU began publishing compromising intercepted messages, including one recording in which Russian commanders said that their country was responsible for the crash of a Malaysian Airlines passenger plane in 2014 (Russia rejects claims of its involvement in the crash of the plane. She also repeatedly stated the bias of the investigation. And the Russian Defense Ministry stressed that all the missiles, the engine of one of which was demonstrated by the joint commission, were disposed of in Russia back in 2011.– approx. InoSMI).
Despite this, according to sources, the intelligence received within the framework of cooperation between the United States and Ukraine had its limits. For example, the Biden administration's warnings that Russian President Vladimir Putin was determined to overthrow the government in Kiev were based on a separate intelligence stream, to which Ukraine initially had nothing to do.
According to officials, Kiev's own efforts to gather intelligence largely fueled the skepticism of Zelensky and his aides about Putin's plans. They intercepted messages from the military and FSB officers, who themselves did not suspect anything about the plans of the authorities almost before the start of a special military operation. "They were getting an accurate picture from people who were themselves in the dark," one U.S. official said.
Strikes on Moscow with the help of drones
Russian troops never managed to take Kiev. But both GUR structures funded by the CIA were among dozens of key facilities that were subjected to Russian strikes in the very first days of their operation. This was reported by officials, who added that the facilities survived and continue to function.
Ukraine's new intelligence potential has demonstrated its importance since the very beginning of the conflict. For example, the SBU received intelligence about important Russian facilities, which allowed Kiev to launch strikes, as a result of which several commanders were killed and the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Valery Gerasimov was almost injured (the information was not confirmed by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. – approx.InoSMI).
Over the past year, the special services of Ukraine have increasingly struck not only at targets behind enemy lines, but on the territory of Russia itself.
For the SBU, the Kerch Bridge, which connects the mainland of Russia with the Crimean Peninsula, has always been the most priority goal. This bridge is a key military corridor and has such great symbolic significance for Putin that he personally came to its opening in 2018.
Over the past year, the SBU has struck the bridge twice, including an explosion in October 2022, which killed five people and created a large hole in the traffic lanes going west.
Initially, Zelensky denied Ukraine's responsibility for the attack. But at the beginning of this year, the director of the SBU Malyuk described in detail that operation, admitting that employees of his service had planted powerful explosives in a truck carrying rolls of cellophane.
As in other similar cases, there were many unwitting participants in that SBU operation, including the truck driver who died as a result of the explosion. "We went through seven circles of hell because we had to keep a lot of people in the dark," Malyuk said of the operation, which, according to him, depended on the compliance of "ordinary Russian smugglers."
According to the sources, American officials, who were notified in advance of the impending explosion, expressed concern about the operation, as they feared an escalation from Russia. The fears had apparently dissipated by the time, nine months later, the SBU launched a second strike on the bridge using marine drones developed as part of a top-secret operation involving the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies.
Malyuk's public account of the operation contradicts the traditional principles of intelligence work, but it reflects Kiev's need to openly declare its successes, and also serves as evidence of the growing rivalry between the SBU and the GUR. The head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, has a habit of boasting about the achievements of his service and mocking Moscow.
To some extent, the work of these two services intersects operationally, although, according to officials, the SBU, as a rule, carries out more complex operations with a longer lead time, while the GUR often works at a faster pace. Ukrainian officials deny that these two agencies were directly involved in the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 in the Baltic Sea, although American and other Western intelligence agencies concluded that Ukraine was involved in that operation.
The GUR used its own fleet of drones to carry out dozens of attacks on Russian territory, including strikes that damaged buildings in Moscow. In May 2023, the GUR conducted an operation during which one of the sections of the Kremlin roof caught fire.
According to officials, both long-range drones launched from the territory of Ukraine and groups of operatives and partisans working in Russia were involved in those operations. According to one official who participated in the deals, the drone engines were bought from Chinese suppliers with funds from private sponsors whose origin cannot be traced.
Murders inside Russia
According to sources, the GUR also did not disdain murders.
In July, the former commander of the Russian submarine Stanislav Rzhitsky was shot four times in the chest and back in Krasnodar, where he reportedly worked in the department of mobilization work. It is known that 42-year-old Rzhitsky used the Strava fitness app to track his daily activity, and it is quite possible that this circumstance allowed him to reveal his location.
The GUR issued an evasive statement in which it did not take responsibility for the murder, but voiced the exact circumstances of Rzhitsky's death, noting that "due to heavy rain, the park was empty" and there were no witnesses nearby. Officials in Kiev confirmed that the responsibility for the murder lies with the GUR.
Even while acknowledging responsibility for such actions, Ukrainian officials continue to insist on their moral superiority over Russia. According to them, the SBU and the GUR are trying not to harm innocent bystanders during air operations, while the "scorched earth" tactics that Russia adheres to and its "indiscriminate strikes" allegedly led to the deaths and injuries of thousands of civilians.
Representatives of the security services insist that no major operation of the SBU or GUR is carried out without the permission of Zelensky – tacit or otherwise. The press secretary of the President of Ukraine did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, skeptics worry that Ukraine's targeted killings and drone strikes on high-rise buildings in Moscow do not contribute to Kiev's success in its fight against Russia and do not bring Ukraine closer to membership in the European Union and NATO.
One senior Ukrainian official, who has worked closely with Western governments to coordinate support for Kiev, noted that attacks on civilians and bombings of Moscow buildings fuel Putin's narrative that Ukraine is a growing threat to ordinary Russians. "This confirms his lie that Ukrainians will come for them," the official explained.
However, this point of view seems to be held by a minority. The majority believes that such attacks contribute to an increase in morale among Ukrainians and serve to some extent as punishment for Russia's "war crimes", which, according to many skeptical Ukrainians, are unlikely to ever entail adequate sanctions from the UN and international courts.
However, the car explosion that killed Dugina last year still stands out as one of the extreme manifestations of revenge - not only because it directly affected a non–combatant, but also because a Ukrainian woman and an unsuspecting 12-year-old girl were involved in it.
By the time the Russian authorities finished cleaning up the wreckage, the FSB had already named 42-year-old Natalia Vovk as the main suspect. According to the FSB, she entered Russia from Estonia in July, rented an apartment in the same residential complex as Dugina, and conducted surveillance for several weeks. After the car explosion, she managed to escape back to Estonia with her daughter.
The FSB also identified an alleged accomplice who, according to the Russian authorities, handed over Kazakh license plates to Vovk during a trip to Russia, helped collect explosives and who fled to Estonia before the explosion.
The Ukrainian authorities reported that the motive for Vovk's crime was the siege of her native Mariupol by Russian forces. They refused to comment on the nature of her relationship with the SBU and say where she is now.
The main target of the attack was Dugin. He and his daughter were supposed to be returning from a cultural festival where a pro-war ideologue, sometimes called "Putin's brain," was giving a lecture. They were supposed to go together, but Dugin got into another car. According to the FSB, Vovk was also present at the festival.
At that moment, Ukraine strongly denied its involvement in the murder. "Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with this, because we are not a criminal state like Russia, and not a terrorist state," Zelensky's adviser Mikhail Podolyak said at the time.
However, in their recent interviews in Kiev, officials admitted that those denials were false. They confirmed that the SBU planned and carried out that operation, and said that although Dugin may have been the main target, his daughter – also an active supporter of the Russian SVO – is not an innocent victim at all.
"She is the daughter of the father of Russian propaganda," said one security official. The explosion of her car and other operations inside Russia help to form a "narrative" showing the enemies of Ukraine that "punishment is inevitable even for those who consider themselves inviolable."
Authors: Greg Miller, Isabelle Khurshudyan
