The sidelining of Ukraine’s security chief and prosecutor general by the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has renewed questions over Russian intelligence infiltration of key ministries before the war, as well as suggesting increasingly public divisions among his inner circle of top officials.
After recent anonymous briefings against Zelenskiy’s childhood friend Ivan Bakanov – who had been in charge of the 30,000-strong state security service, the SBU, since 2019 – over claims of failure to counter Russian infiltration, Bakanov was abruptly suspended on Sunday along with the prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, who had been leading war crimes investigations.
While the reason cited for the dismissals was the claim of widespread Russian collaboration in the two departments, it also appears to reflect jostling for influence around the president among key players.
Zelenskiy, widely feted on the world stage as a wartime leader, had been dogged on the domestic stage before the invasion by accusations that he had named inexperienced outsiders, including friends, to jobs in which they were out of their depth.
The latest move comes just a week after Zelenskiy dismissed ambassadors to five countries including Germany, and several other envoys including to Hungary, Norway, the Czech Republic and India,. Last month there was a public spat with the head of his armed forces.
Bakanov, in particular, was regarded as close to Zelenskiy, growing up in the same city of Kryvyi Rih. He worked for Zelenskiy’s Studio Kvartal-95 production company and ran the former actor’s campaign headquarters during his presidential race. At the time of his appointment, he was accused of holding a top position in a private company registered in Spain in apparent breach of Ukraine’s anti-corruption legislation.
While observers suggest that one motive is to demonstrate to the Ukrainian public that Zelenskiy will not tolerate underperformance, the moves also come amid hostile briefing against key figures that has ticked up in recent weeks.
Initial reports suggested the pair had been fired, but Andriy Smyrnov, Zelenskiy’s deputy chief of staff, clarified that they had been suspended. “Everyone has been waiting long enough for more concrete and, perhaps, radical results from the heads of these two bodies to cleanse them of collaborators and traitors,” he said. “However, in the sixth month of the war, we continue to find dozens of such people at each of these institutions.”
A well-sourced article for Politico three weeks ago quoted unnamed senior officials as saying Zelenskiy was planning to replace Bakanov for lack of competency, not least after complaints that his agency was ill prepared for the Russian invasion, in particular over its failure to destroy a key bridge to Kherson in the south.
The article suggested Zelenskiy and Bakanov rarely spoke, that the president was fretting about the optics of sacking someone from his inner circle, and that SBU daily operations were being run from the presidential office.
“We are highly unsatisfied with his job and are working to get rid of him,” an official close to Zelenskiy told the website. “We are not satisfied with his managerial, you know, [skills] because now you need … anti-crisis management skills like we don’t think that he has.”
On 27 June, when asked about Bakanov’s position at a press briefing, Zelenskiy seemed to suggest his job was safe. “As for the head of the security service of Ukraine, if I wanted to fire him, I would have already fired him,” he said.
The Sunday presidential decree announcing the dismissal of the two officials cited hundreds of criminal proceedings over alleged treason and collaboration by people within their departments and other law enforcement agencies.
“In particular, more than 60 employees of the prosecutor’s office and the SBU [state security service] have remained in the occupied territory and work against our state,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address to the nation. “Such an array of crimes against the foundations of the state’s national security, and the links recorded between Ukrainian security forces and Russian special services, raise very serious questions about their respective leaders.”
The announcement came as the former head of the SBU in Crimea, Oleh Kulinich, who was fired in March, was arrested on suspicion of high treason.
The suspension of Venediktova, who was leading war crime investigations in Ukraine and was another former staffer in Zelenskiy’s campaign headquarters, was seen as more surprising. Admired by western officials and media, she was, however, seen as more controversial in Ukraine over her department’s failures regarding a number high-profile anti-corruption cases.
On Sunday Russian missiles hit industrial facilities in Mykolaiv, a key shipbuilding centre in southern Ukraine. The mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych, said the missiles struck an industrial and infrastructure facility. Mykolaiv has been a target of regular missile strikes in recent weeks as the Russians have sought to soften Ukrainian defences.
The Russian military has declared a goal to cut off Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coast all the way to the Romanian border. If successful, the effort would deal a crushing blow to the Ukrainian economy and trade, and allow Moscow to secure a land bridge to Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria, which hosts a Russian military base.
Early in the campaign, Ukrainian forces fended off Russian attempts to capture Mykolaiv, which sits near the Black Sea coast between Russian-occupied Crimea and the main Ukrainian port of Odesa. Since then, Russian troops have halted their attempts to advance in the city but have continued to pummel Mykolaiv and Odesa with regular missile strikes.
A Russian defence ministry spokesperson, Lt Gen Igor Konashenkov, said on Sunday that Russian missiles had destroyed a depot for anti-ship Harpoon missiles delivered to Ukraine by Nato allies, a claim that could not be independently confirmed.
The Russians, fearing a Ukrainian counteroffensive, also sought to reinforce their positions in the Kherson region near Crimea and in part of the northern Zaporizhzhia region that they seized in the opening stage of the war.
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