Dumb and Dumber: Top 3 Russian Spies Caught in Ukraine

The most obvious and obscure spies arrested by Ukraine Counter Intelligence Service

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion last year, Ukraine’s security service (SBU) has exposed at least 600 Russian agents and spies operating within Ukraine. They have also initiated more than 1500 criminal proceedings for treason and espionage, 340 of which have already been sent to court.

Although this seems like a lot of Russian collaborators, most of them don’t pose much of a threat to Ukraine’s national security. It is true there are professional Russian intelligence agents in Ukraine who have worked in foreign intelligence for years. These agents work on sophisticated long-term projects that are hard to uncover. Rooting them out requires a lot of SBU counterintelligence (a division office that is already stretched thin), coordination between different SBU offices, and close collaboration with international partners.

But the majority of current collaborators recruited by FSB these days are inept at best and simply comical at worse. There are several reasons of this. First, there are few adequate people willing to help Russia left to choose from, so now the FSB is scratching the bottom of the barrel, recruiting those they possibly looked down on a year ago.

A second issue is internal problems within the FSB. The organization is not only rewarding mid-level management for the recruitment of subpar collaborators, these collaborators are being assigned tasks that are not even useful for Russia. Since good recruitment and completed task numbers are all that are required for bonuses and promotions, mid-level management are eager to inflate both with little regard for the quality and usefulness of either. FSB also does not value those they recruit and as a result, do not provide them with necessary training or even instructions on how to behave to not get caught.

With this in mind, I asked four high-level SBU counterintelligence officers from different regions of Ukraine, to tell me about the most ridiculous Russian collaborators they had come across. Here’s the top three:

#3 The Obvious One. On March 2023, SBU counterintelligence arrested an ethnic Russian from a Baltic state sent to blow up a transportation infrastructure in Rivne, thus disrupting the delivery of Western weapons to Ukraine. However, before arriving in Ukraine on February 19, 2023, the man had been in and out of Ukraine, fighting for Russia since 2014. First, he had fought with the group called Oplot, and then in the Han battalion of Donbas separatist forces. When the full-scale Russian invasion had begun last year, he fought against Ukraine forces in Zaporozhie and Kherson.

Needless to say, he was well-known to the SBU. “Since May of last year we’ve had all of his information,” commented one SBU officer. “We were very surprised that someone as “secret” as him would even think of entering Ukraine [again]. The guy probably honestly thought that because he has EU passport, he could enter Ukraine unnoticed.” The same officer then said, “Catching him, and those in the country he exposed, was a very easy and fast operation.”

#2 The Obscure One. The Ukraine uses a military-tech, situational awareness system called Delta to coordinate and share information between various military and law enforcement units. To gain access to the system, someone has to officially apply, explain why access is needed, and produce proper ID and documents. Then, if necessary, that same person may be interrogated and required to take a lie detector test.

Several months ago, a man applied to Delta by sending a fake ID and supporting documents. What was most surprising about the situation was how stupid his cover story was. Though he was a citizen of South Caucasus republic and did not speak a word of French, he claimed to work for a French security organization that did not even have a website. Here he was particularly unlucky because his case ended up on the desk of a security officer who spoke French fluently. Not only was the work phone number the man listed only activated days before he applied, there was no messagers associated with the number. His email address was also not a corporate one.

 But the strangest thing the Russian collaborator had included in his application was a letter supposedly from Ukraine’s prime minister. The letter was only two sentences long and had no stamps or signatures on it. And because the prime minister’s job is not directly related to security issues, the letter alone was enough to raise legitimacy questions.

 “How stupid could his FSB managers be to not even make a website for the company to make it look more or less legit?” commented an SBU counterintelligence officer. Agents from Delta’s security checking his documents were so amused, they started trolling him, asking for more and more supporting documents and pictures to see what else he could come up with. And he indeed sent them pictures of himself.

#1. The Technologically Advanced One. In December of 2022, SBU arrested a well-known, sixty-year-old Ukrainian activist of a defunct Communist party, closed in Ukraine for being pro-Russian. This man had stolen information about Ukrainian armed forces and law enforcement members, and was headed to Budapest where he planned to pass on the information to the Russian Embassy there. Although the information was sensitive, it was not secret. The SBU had been watching the collaborator and had controlled the information he was allowed to get.

However, the collaborator had believed it to be secret information and had also, interestingly, took the information across the border on a flash drive he had inserted into his anus. It is unclear as to why he did not just carry it in his pocket. No one on the Ukraine border checks personal belongings, not to mention a memory flash drive.

“And why not to just send it to Russia by email?” One SBU officer said.

“This guy definitely watched too many spy movies from the 1960s,” commented another SBU officer. “The only thing missing was a wig and sunglasses.”

Although these collaborators are easier to detect and arrest, it does not mean they are harmless. Investigating and arresting them still takes time and resources and distracts SBU counterintelligence officers from detecting other, more dangerous enemy collaborators.