The recent release to Russian President Vladimir Putin of what was thought to be a Spanish journalist Pablo González as part of a prisoner / spy / assassin swap in August 2024, as well as the arrest in September 2024 by Ukraine’s SBU (State Security Service) of five individuals apparently living in central Kyiv and committing arson attacks upon Ukrainian Armed Forces targets on the instructions of the FSB (Russia's state security service), has given rise to a general sense of paranoia as to whether unknown persons who have secreted themselves into Ukrainian society are really spies or agents acting for the Russians. González was an unusual case of a journalist who covered the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and was accredited by the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a journalist. It seems that he may have been a long-term deep cover agent for one of Russia’s intelligence agencies, although there is always a lot of confusion about which of the myriad agencies these spies work for. Given his military demeanour, it is entirely possible that he was a GRU operative, designed for deep cover and operations of assassination or other serious acts of treason or terror abroad directly on the instructions of the Russian President. This fits the profile of GRU operatives perfectly; they adopt a foreign nationality (in this case Spanish) and even acquire a foreign wife and a full set of foreign connections, and they wait for instructions (if any come). Eventually González was arrested by the Poles in 2022 and held without trial for two years because his trial would have been extremely embarrassing; then he was released to the Russians as part of the August 2024 prisoner swap.
The September 2024 arrest of the five FSB Kyiv agents is rather different. These people had probably been embedded with the FSB in Kyiv for a long time, quite possibly well before the second invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. The FSB has been known to have an extensive presence in Ukraine at least since 1999 when Vladimir Putin became director of the FSB and immediately had his eyes on Ukraine. This meant that the FSB secreted Russian sympathisers into public institutions throughout Ukraine with a view to controlling those institutions over the democratically elected politicians and any expression of democratic will of the population. This kept Ukraine a highly suspicious, paranoid country as the FSB were everywhere. It got worse, of course, as time went on and President Vladimir Putin’s plans to occupy Ukraine and recreate a Soviet Union were gradually forged. The plan to annex Crimea in 2014 had been long in the making, and was executed most neatly. The plans to create “people’s republics” across Ukraine, in which Russian-speaking majorities of the population from Odessa to Luhansk would install puppet governments subject to direction by the FSB operating abroad, was of mixed success in 2014, however. The attempts to do this succeeded only in Donetsk and Luhansk and then it was only in Donetsk that the entirety of the oblast was occupied; we are fighting now about approximately half of the oblast that the Russians did not manage to occupy in 2014, and in fact we have been fighting about this issue constantly since 2014.
FSB attempts to instal people’s republics in 2014 failed in Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mykolaïv and Odessa. Had they succeeded, Russia would have got much of what she wanted ten years ago but those attempts were resisted by the institutions in those parts of Ukraine, often using force, notwithstanding FSB intimidation of the local population. The FSB used to work (and still do to a degree) by threatening family members or friends of an individual in occupied Ukraine or in Russia; a number of Ukrainians’ families continue to live in Russia notwithstanding the conflict and they have had to make the decision whether to continue living in Russia or to participate in the arduous one-way journey to Ukraine either via Belarus and Lithuania or via the corridor between Russia and Sumy province that once existed from Kursk to Sumy. (This corridor, officially sanctioned by both Russia and Ukraine as one-way route for Russians of Ukrainian origin who wanted to leave Russia for Ukraine permanently, involved an SBU 24-hour filtration process of questioning departing Russians who would then be given Ukrainian identity cards and placed in Ukrainian refugee camps in the city of Sumy. It ran at least until late 2023; with the Ukrainian occupation of a part of Kursk Oblast in Russia during the summer fighting season in 2024, it is unclear what has happened to that method of passage between Russia and Ukraine.
However none of these people are real dangers to Ukrainian national security. Those who might have pro-Russian sympathies within Ukrainian society have been embedded here for a number of years and are not recent evacuees from Russia to Ukraine. They are the remains of the People’s Republic attempts in 2014, FSB agents who were never caught or exposed. Since 2019, President Volodimir Zelenskiy has been arduous in hunting out the FSB officials or those with FSB links in all levels of government and that is one reason why so many officials have been fired, often without official explanation. So we can say that Ukraine has or had a remaining substantial number of Russian-leaning officials some of whom might be classed as spies if they are engaging in actual cooperation with the Russian intelligence authorities.
Then there are people who are apolitical and just want the war to end. They may have family in the occupied territories or indeed live on the front line; they may pass over parts of the front line from day to day. A number of civilians do this or have done this in the past, and the “holes” in the front line open and close quite frequently but many civilians effectively live on both sides of the front line and will sell their crops (they are mostly villagers) and other supplies to anyone who wants to buy them. Are they Russian spies? No; they are just the sort of entrepreneur who always pops up in every war and makes money out of war by buying and selling things to both sides and we call them war profiteers. There is nothing you can really do about them as they work down impenetrable networks of side rounds, village routes and things that aren’t on maps and they use intimate local knowledge to travel.
Of the remaining FSB or Russian intelligence influence in Ukraine, it is far diminished from what it was although naturally enough the paranoia is far stronger in the east and the south, closer to the front line, than it is in the western cities. Foreigners, although typically welcomed, are often persons of note to Russian intelligence and sometimes their activities may be monitored. As has already been written in these pages, there is a substantial social media surveillance by the Russians of foreigners’ activities supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This is much less likely to affect you if you are in Lviv than if you are in Kherson or Kharkiv; but it is always a possibility. One of those unknown followers of you on social media in all likelihood may be a Russian bot, and social media is so prevalent that it is easy to follow with algorithms. I suppose someone in Russia is going to end up reading this at some point, after it has been posted on social media. So Russian intelligence is interested, to a degree, in foreigners working in the field in Ukraine, but you are very unlikely to be followed down the street by a Russian agent: that isn’t how it’s done these days.
The number of active FSB agents running operations to commit crimes, such as the arson agents the SBU caught in Kyiv, is probably very low now. The suspicion that everyone is an “informer”, which you sometimes pick up on in Ukrainian society, particularly in the east and the south, is a throwback to the Soviet era in which people would inform upon their neighbours and this sort of thing persists to the present day only there is nobody to inform to: the SBU was been comprehensively reformed from a KGB model of operation and now represents a contemporary counter-terrorism special police force. People are obsessed with denouncing people to the SBU; I have heard this sort of thing dozens of times; but the SBU doesn’t accept KGB-style denunciations. People who think it does have lived amongst the paranoia too long. There’s a war on, and the SBU is committed to playing its quasi-military role in contributing to that. So although people in Ukraine still like to talk about denunciations, in reality there is nobody to denounce things to. Those institutions have been dismantled in Ukraine, which is one of the reasons why we can say that Ukraine is now independent and free.
Are foreigners here being watched by the Russians? The prominent ones probably are; they are being watched electronically which is why it is important to keep your social media profile so low. Are people watching you as you walk down the street? Is there a Russian agent in your WhatsApp group? This is unlikely; and even if there is then you’ll never know about it and they will be reading a lot of boring stuff. So take it easy, and don’t assume that you are being tracked or followed by the Russians. To the extent that they are doing this, it is because you are excessive in the use of your social media that is so dominant these days, and I am afraid it is your fault. Otherwise, with a few exceptions that the SBU use law enforcement powers against such as arsonists living in central Kyiv, you don’t need to be paranoid in free Ukraine. The Russians are not watching you anymore. Or are they?