Ukraine’s spymaster comes out of the shadows

He wears a pistol to interviews with foreign journalists and discusses wartime intelligence. Weapons and military gear are strewn on the floor of his Kyiv office. He says he has “sources” close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. For an intelligence chief running Ukraine’s spy operations during war with Russia, Kyrylo Budanov, 37, has built up an unusually public profile that he has used to get his message out and to menace Russia from afar. These days, a spy boss cannot stay in the shadows, he says. “It’s not possible without this, not anymore,” the head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) told Reuters in an interview at his heavily defended headquarters in the capital. “And all the next wars are going to look like this. In any country in the world. We can say that we’re setting a trend here.” Ukraine drew conclusions about the need to get its message across since 2014, when Moscow took the world by surprise to seize Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and unleash a proxy war in the east, he says. “We completely lost the information war in 2014. And the war, which began in (2022) – we started here in a completely different way. And now the Russians are losing the information battle.” Since a mercenary mutiny in Russia last month made Moscow’s ruling system appear more opaque and unstable, Budanov has used the opportunity to weigh in about what Ukraine’s spies know about their enemy. In parts of his interview reported by Reuters earlier this week, he said the mutinying Russian mercenaries had headed for a nuclear base in pursuit of a backpack-sized atomic weapon. Several Russian sources that spoke to Reuters confirmed parts of that account.