“I’ll be honest, boys,” the father told the officers, “in the first days, I was passing coordinates to my guys.”
But in a country where loyalties can be twisted, were his guys the Russians or the Ukrainians?
Even amid a war in which Moscow has targeted Ukrainian civilians and caused countless deaths, Russia has been able to recruit Ukrainians to aid its invasion. Sometimes it’s through blackmail. Sometimes it’s through payoffs. And sometimes Ukrainians are simply sympathetic to their country’s enemy — be it because of Soviet nostalgia or shared Russian language and ethnic identity.
Weeding out those moles and saboteurs is the SBU’s job. Officers from the counterintelligence department of the highly secretive agency recently allowed Washington Post journalists rare access to their daily work, which includes going into recently liberated villages and conducting what’s called “filtration” — interviewing locals about what happened under occupation and who might have collaborated with the Russians. At times, they are so close to the front line they end up fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers.
While the Ukrainian military fights the foreign foe in front of them, the SBU counterintelligence department’s main task remains looking inward for enemies — sometimes even within its own ranks.
In July, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky replaced the agency’s director after several senior officers were arrested and branded traitors. One such mole was recently uncovered in the Kharkiv office after he allegedly informed Russian security services about the time and place of a planned meeting between the Kharkiv mayor, the local SBU chief and the commander of Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade — a high-value target for an airstrike.
“It’s hard to get used to it, even though it’s what we do every day,” said an SBU officer who asked to be identified by his call sign, Advokat, which means “lawyer.”
“You think how much damage this activity has caused — how many children, civilians, soldiers, brothers and sisters died and were injured because of it,” Advokat said. “How many were left without families and homes and forced to leave? When you remember that, it motivates you to expose the traitors as much as possible and bring them to justice.”
In a room at a downtown Kharkiv detention center, Sergey, the man facing treason charges for revealing the location of Ukrainian military bases, sat on a small stool and fiddled with his hands. Sergey agreed to an interview with The Post on the condition that his surname not be used, but Advokat and prison guards remained in the room. Sergey admitted to sending screenshots of Google maps, with some spots circled, to a Russian cellphone number.
Sergey’s family lives in small villages near the town of Balakliya, a part of Kharkiv region that Russian forces occupied in the first days of the war. After his sister told him that Russian soldiers had stolen money from their father, Sergey said, he complained to a neighbor about being worried for his family’s safety. The neighbor gave him a Russian number to call and explain the situation, Sergey said. So, he did.
His father’s money was returned a month later, Sergey said. Then Sergey received a message from the Russian number offering to “work together.” Sergey said he refused.
“The next day, they wrote that they know where my parents are,” he said. “They said that this is a war and anything can happen. And like this, they blackmailed me.”
The SBU counterintelligence department divides Ukrainians who work with the Russians into different categories. Those like Sergey, recruited while living in territory controlled by Ukraine, are considered agents. The most valuable agents are those with access to information, such as moles within the SBU or other government agencies. They are the hardest to expose, Advokat said, because they understand how the SBU operates and can better cover their tracks.
Then there are collaborators: Ukrainians who cooperate with or help the Russians in occupied areas. But even those people are split into their own ranks. Some have pro-Russian views and eagerly aid the occupiers, for example, by revealing who in town served in the Ukrainian military. But there are others Advokat referred to as “invertebrates” — people bending to survive under difficult conditions.
When the Ukrainian military recaptures a city or town, SBU officers are the first ones in after them to begin the filtration process — weeding out the collaborators through interviews with locals, checking people’s phones and other means.
In early September, after Ukrainian forces expelled Russian troops from most of the Kharkiv region, Advokat and his colleagues entered the city of Kupiansk on the same day as the advancing soldiers.
The Russians had used the city as the seat of their regional occupation government, so the SBU officers went first to the abandoned local administration building. Inside, they found a list of people who had worked with the Russian-controlled authorities. The Russians retreated so fast, they had left it behind.
“There was so much work that we spent several nights there,” Advokat said.
In the Kharkiv region, which borders Russia and is predominantly Russian-speaking, both agents and collaborators are widespread. Many residents traveled to Russia frequently for work or still have relatives living there.
“You cannot suspect everyone,” Advokat said. “But over time, a certain professional deformation occurs when you start to suspect everyone.”
Sergey’s father was also a suspect. If the son had passed information to the Russians, maybe the father also helped the soldiers occupying his village. Speaking to the man outside his home, Advokat began a preliminary interview. The goal was to persuade him to come with them for a more formal interrogation back at their office. The father is not being identified because of risks to his safety and because he has not been charged.
Sergey’s father then told Advokat that he had been passing coordinates of Russian troops to someone in the SBU, even giving Advokat his contact’s first and last name.
“How did the Russian forces behave themselves?” Advokat asked him.
“You could say they were even respectable,” the father answered, speaking in Ukrainian.
“Did they steal from you?”
“Yes.”
“But you just said they behaved respectably,” Advokat responded, raising his voice.
The father then said Russian soldiers made some attempts to rape his wife, which earned another sarcastic response from Advokat about the man’s initial appraisal of the occupiers. He told Advokat that another soldier later came and gave him 50,000 rubles, about $820, and apologized for his colleagues who stole from him. For Advokat, that confirmed an exchange of money took place for Sergey’s services.
“How could I have not taken the money?” the man said. “Then they would’ve said that I was against them and would’ve done something else to me.”
After his village was liberated by Ukrainian troops in September, Ukrainian forces posted an air-defense system and an M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, near his home. The father even kept the shrapnel pieces from an airstrike the Russians delivered then.
Coincidentally, it was information on that very type of equipment’s whereabouts in Chuhuiv that his son had allegedly passed to the Russians.
The father told Advokat that he was a patriot who hated what his son had done and he agreed to come in and give the SBU his statement later in the week. Outside his home, he and his wife allowed the SBU officers to inspect their phones, and Advokat said there didn’t appear to be anything suspicious. But Advokat refrained from making a judgment. There was still more to investigate — with this case and countless others.
“I will tell you honestly, he is my son, but he took five years off my life,” the man told Advokat.
“Why five years?” Advokat asked.
“Well, it’s this war, you know,” he answered. “I can’t stand to go through this again. I don’t want to see this filth. I can breathe freely now — and then I couldn’t breathe, believe me.
“I’m sorry,” the father added finally. “May God help you.”
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