The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) presented on Jan. 8 a brief report on its anti-terror and counter-intelligence activities in 2018, revealing the number of foreign spies and Russian-backed militants it claims to have exposed, as well as the number of terror attacks prevented in the past year.
The 32,000-personnel agency said its counterintelligence department said it had caught 71 persons involved into “espionage and sabotage activities of foreign special agencies,” and had initiated 114 high treason cases.
The SBU said it had foiled eight acts of terror over the past year, five of which were investigated and solved. In general, the SBU added, the service’s personnel managed to prevent as many as 28 terror attacks throughout the country from 2016 through 2018.
The agency also claimed to have uncovered the identities of 152 members of Russian-led forces in the Donbas, which the SBU classes as terror organizations, of whom 54 were arrested.
According to the SBU’s military counter-intelligence department, up to 850 criminal cases were opened against enemy fighters, and 144 guilty verdicts were passed against them in 2018.
In general, the agency, which also engaged in combating organized crime and economic fraud, claimed to have investigated 10,931 cases against 2,699 persons in 2018.
Nonetheless, the SBU’s activities last year were dogged by controversies and setbacks that rocked the nation and even echoed worldwide.
Most notably, this includes the case of Arkadiy Babchenko, an exiled Russian writer and fierce Kremlin critic, the assassination of whom the SBU staged in May — allegedly with the goal of saving the journalist from an actual murder planned and arranged by Russian agents.
After a day of being officially dead, Babchenko appeared at an SBU press conference alive and well on May 30, which was followed by the arrest of Borys German, a Ukrainian arms dealer who, according to the SBU, was the mediator for a Russian agent network in Ukraine and who had been hired to carry out Babchenko’s assassination.
The headline-making Babchenko case was presented by the SBU as its victory over the Russian secret services, but the details of it raised questions in the global media over the SBU’s claims and methods.
The allegedly successful special operation was initially deemed a sign that Ukraine’s security forces had recovered after a number of serious blunders in 2017, such as the assassination of Colonel Maksym Shapoval of the military intelligence in Kyiv on June 27, 2017, or of SBU Colonel Oleksandr Kharaberiush in Mariupol on March 31, 2017, which was perceived as a tough call from Russian adversary.
But in October Nashi Groshi, an investigating journalism project, accused the family of Serhiy Semochko, currently serving as deputy head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service and a senior SBU officer before 2018, of obtaining real estate tworth Hr 200 million ($7.2 million) by unclear means.
According to the journalists, Semochko made his illegal fortune by criminally exploiting healthcare businesses in Ukraine.
Moreover, the project claimed that Semochko’s wife and daughter had Russian citizenship and ran business in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Semochko himself denied all accusations; Nonetheless, Ukraine’s NABU anti-corruption bureau initiated an investigation regarding his allegedly illicit profiteering.
Moreover, in December, the SBU counter-intelligence officially confirmed the Russian citizenship of Semochko’s daughter and wife, but the official was never removed from office.
SBU personnel in 2018 were also involved in the Nov. 25 attack by the Russian coast guard on three Ukrainian naval vessels in the Black Sea near the Kerch Strait. Out of the total crew of 24 Ukrainian servicemen on the attacked warships, two were SBU officers providing counterintelligence support for the naval operation.
Identified as Andriy Drach and Vasyl Soroka, both agents were detained by Russian authorities and sent to Moscow.
In 2018, the SBU also ceased its formal leadership of the four-year-long anti-Terror Operation against Russian-backed forces in the Donbas in favor of the military-led Joint Operative Headquarters, which took control of all formations deployed in the war zone starting from April 30, 2018.
