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Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reprimanded state agencies after a shootout involving two rival security services broke out on the streets of Kyiv.
After violence erupted overnight and on Wednesday morning in the sleepy Berezniaky district, Ukraine’s largest spy agency, the SBU, released a first statement claiming that a joint operation with military intelligence, known as the HUR, had foiled a Russian “terrorist attack” targeting “one of the leaders of the Russian opposition”.
But four hours later the SBU suggested in a fresh statement that it had in fact clashed with members of military intelligence. It omitted any mention of co-operation with HUR to describe a stand-off with a “group of individuals” trying to block SBU officers from carrying out a search.
Agents from the SBU’s elite “Alpha” unit ultimately opened fire and arrested three people who “belong to one of the units of Ukraine’s defence forces”, the intelligence agency said. HUR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The SBU said several people had been injured “among those who resisted”.
Zelenskyy “came down hard” on the “heads of the structures” involved in the incident, the Ukraine president’s chief communications adviser Dmytro Lytvyn told journalists after details of the clash emerged.
Zelenskyy also called on them to “provide information to the public”, Lytvyn said. Details of the fight and the reasons for it remain unclear.
The incident appears to be connected to previous reports about the arrest of a commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a unit of Russian nationalists fighting for Ukraine and attached to HUR. The unit is headed by Russian far-right extremist Denis Nikitin.
RVC chief of staff Aleksandr Fortuna said on Tuesday the unit’s deputy commander Stepan Kaplunov had been “abducted” days earlier “without any information . . . about the charges brought against him”.
Kaplunov’s lawyer Taras Brovsky told Ukrainian investigative outlet Slidstvo that the deputy commander had been arrested by the SBU in late August and brought back to his flat on Wednesday for a search — at which point HUR officers tried to prevent the SBU from entering the flat.
The SBU has not confirmed Kaplunov’s arrest or commented on any accusations against him.
The Kyiv street where the confrontation took place had been cordoned off on Wednesday morning, with footage showing heavily armed men turning residents around when they tried to enter.
The shootout raises questions about Kyiv’s ability to keep in check agencies whose influence and resources have greatly increased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Both the SBU and HUR have been involved in many aspects of the war, from frontline fighting to long-range drone strikes and sabotage operations.
The conflict transformed the image of the SBU, a sprawling agency with an official staff of up to 41,000, from that of a corrupt organisation in dire need of reform to one of Ukraine’s most effective fighting forces.
Kyrylo Budanov, head of the president’s office and former chief of military intelligence, called for a “thorough and impartial investigation” but seemed to criticise the SBU when saying that “no one has the right to abduct servicemen with impunity, open fire in the streets of our cities”.
The stand-off took place as Kyiv endured its sixth day of Russian drone strikes in a row, an unprecedented duration that Ukrainian officials said represented a change of tactics from Moscow and an attempt to “paralyse” economic activity.
Explosions and anti-air fire could be heard across the city during the day. Ten people were injured by attacks that damaged a university building, five residential buildings, a kindergarten and warehouses, according to the Kyiv department of the prosecutor’s office.
