Ukraine’s SBU domestic intelligence service announced Thursday that it had prevented a plot orchestrated by a Russian intelligence service that would have seen Ukrainians travel to Russia to attack Russian interests.
The purported intent of this attack would have been to provide the Kremlin with justification for Russian retaliatory measures against Ukraine. The disrupted plot, if verified, would be in the form of the false-flag “maskirovka,” or “camouflage,” strategy that the United States is concerned Russia is pursuing toward Ukraine.
Public evidence for Russia’s interest in such a strategy is already apparent. Although little noticed in the West, Russia’s domestic FSB intelligence service recently reattributed an August 2021 bus explosion in the Ukraine-proximate Russian city of Voronezh as the result of an attack by Ukrainian saboteurs.
The SBU’s detail on this latest plot, however, is compelling.
The SBU accuses Russian intelligence services of recruiting three Ukrainian criminals in Kyiv and paying them $4,000 each to recruit “two groups of five people” each. These groups would then travel to Russia, with the first group leaving “in the next few days.” On arrival, they were to receive instructions from their Russian handlers on the specifics of their attacks. The SBU says the suspects were assured by their Russian handlers they would be released on the completion of their mission. But, the SBU adds wryly, “according to available data, the provocateurs were planned to be eliminated during the detention.”
On paper, this plot has credibility.
It entails a measure of operational security in the form of Russia only informing the provocateurs of their mission once they were on Russian soil and eliminating them after their attacks. Russia would thus gain the justification for escalation with a mitigated risk of the plot being identified or later proven as a false flag. Nevertheless, the communications between the suspects and their Russian handlers lead me to believe that the SBU investigation was likely supported by the U.S. National Security Agency or its British GCHQ counterpart. While the SBU is able to monitor its own citizens effectively, it lacks the indigenous capacity to monitor most covert Russian-origin intelligence service communications.
Ukraine’s public identification of the plot is also compelling: President Volodymyr Zelensky has been reluctant to lend credibility to Western concerns that his nation faces an imminent attack. The SBU is unlikely to have released this information were it not highly confident of its veracity.
Interestingly, the SBU also announced Thursday that it had separately arrested another Ukrainian man after he set fire to a car outside a government building in Kyiv. The SBU says the man was paid by the Belarusian KGB to conduct his attack.
Regardless, the top line is clear: Contrary to its diplomatic pretense, Russia continues to escalate its preparation for a major invasion of Ukraine.
