Spectacular downloads in Ukraine: business as usual?

“Traitors”, “collaborators”, “deserters”. More than 650 Ukrainians have been charged in this way during the last four months of the war. For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski, the cup was finally filled. He denounced 60 civil servants who remained in the territories occupied by the Russians and who now work against the Ukrainian state: “The proven connections between the collaborators of the Ukrainian security forces and the Russian secret services raise very serious questions for the competent bosses,” thundered the Ukrainian president. Zelenskiy reacted by dismissing those chiefs by decree: Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova and the head of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service, Ivan Bakanov.

Bakanov’s dismissal is particularly explosive, as he is considered a childhood friend and longtime comrade of Zelensky. Before his appointment as head of the SBU, Bakanov had no experience in the secret service; instead, he ran the political cabaret group and future television production company Studio Kvartal 95, in which Zelenski himself was the main actor.

Personnel changes as a “logical consequence”?

While the two dismissals and withdrawals of ambassadors that preceded them were surprising abroad, they were certainly no surprise to anyone in Ukraine.

Roman Kostenko, deputy of the center-right pro-European party “Golos” and secretary of the parliamentary commission for national security, reports to DW that he has long received complaints about the work of the security services and traitors within its ranks. This reportedly included the former head of the SBU’s main internal security department, Brigadier General Andriy Naumov, who had a meteoric career under Bakanov and left Ukraine on February 23, the day before the war began. “We see how it ended – he fled the country and was caught somewhere in Serbia with laundered money,” says Kostenko. Furthermore, since the start of the war, several high-ranking SBU operatives are said to have cooperated with the Russians in southern Ukraine, meaning that the inexperienced Bakanov did not have full control of his department. .

The deputy director of the presidential office, Andrij Smirnov, defends to DW the personnel decisions of its boss Zelenski as “inevitable in times of war”. Smirnov cites recordings of phone conversations of indicted officials that would be considered evidence. Ukrainian political scientist Petro Okhotin relativizes in an interview for DW, it is not about dismissals, but about temporary suspensions and about the fact that “Zelenski has lost faith in the bodies in question. Now an investigation must be done to find out why there are collaborations in structures as important as the SBU and the General Prosecutor’s Office”. Okhotini does not rule out that the suspended officials will one day return to their duties.

Corrupt and inefficient?

The expert of the anti-corruption organization Transparency International, Kateryna Ryzhenko, disputes this. She fears that the suspension of the head of the SBU and the general prosecutor will not make the two authorities better. “Even the public and the prosecution still have some unanswered questions about Bakanov and Venediktova; so far their dismissal does not solve the problems (of corruption and cooperation – editor’s note).

Ukrainian publicist Volodymyr Fesenko sees these problems especially in the counterintelligence of the Ukrainian secret service SBU. A kind of “cleansing” is currently taking place there, he explains to DW. “This does not mean, however, that all who are exchanged there are Russian spies and traitors. On the contrary, we are dealing with concrete accusations of inefficiency.”

Asked about the strategy the Ukrainian president is pursuing with these spectacular dismissals, Fesenko downplays their importance. According to him, this is a “situational decision caused by certain circumstances – by the mistakes of the staff of the former head of the SBU”. The political scientist also remembers the escape of the vice president of the SBU, Naumov, in the first days of the war.

According to Fesenko, there is no particular line that can be seen after the dismissal of General Prosecutor Venediktova. This is already the third change in the last three years and has a lot to do with internal political intrigues: “In recent years, the prosecution has always been directed by political representatives who followed their political interests”, says Fesenko. “This is a general problem of Ukraine’s domestic politics.”

Ukrainian political scientist Petro Okhotin also rules out a special ulterior motive of Zelensky: “In wartime, there can be no long-term strategies, because it is impossible to calculate many aspects at the same time.” The leadership of the Ukrainian state is currently more similar to the leadership of military units, where concrete tactical tasks are concerned. Depending on the quality of the performance of these tasks, the responsible “service persons” are also evaluated./DW

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