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Ruslan Osypenko, the police chief of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which has been subjected to increasingly intense artillery attacks, said that tracking and detaining suspected informants was one of his top priorities. His force has a unit dedicated to monitoring social media channels to detect people passing information on military activities and targeting to Russian forces.
Informants are of all types, he said, and often act on the promise of a position in a future, Russian-controlled administration. “They can be young and old,” he said in an interview Monday in his temporary base in the city of Pokrovsk. “The Russian special services are working in this direction, we know that.”
Mykyta Poturaiev, a Ukrainian lawmaker who recently convened a parliamentary committee to investigate collaboration, said that Orthodox priests loyal to Moscow had given pro-Russian sermons, provided Russians tips on targets, and informed on Ukrainian activists.
“One example is very illustrative,” Mr. Poturaiev said. In one Russian-occupied village, he said, a priest helped billet Russian officers in local houses and arranged for a warehouse to store ammunition.
But infiltration of the domestic intelligence service and prosecutors’ office — the very agencies that are intended to find and prosecute traitors — is particularly insidious.
In his decree dismissing Mr. Bakanov, Mr. Zelensky cited an article under martial law that pertains to “failure to perform service duties, which led to human casualties or other grave consequences.”
The decree did not specify what casualties or consequences, but speculation swirled in Kyiv on Monday that Mr. Bakanov had been ousted for glaring intelligence failures in the first days of the war in the southern city of Kherson, which the Russians captured almost without a fight. Local officials in Kherson switched sides, and explosives were removed from bridges around the city, Mr. Ariev, the opposition member of Parliament said.
In late March, Mr. Zelensky stripped two generals of the security service of their ranks, calling them traitors; one was in charge of the Kherson region and the other fled Ukraine on the eve of the invasion, only to be apprehended months later in Serbia, accused of trying to smuggle cash and emeralds into the country.
One Parliament member, Oleksiy Honcharenko, who is not affiliated with a party, said of Mr. Zelensky’s reference to “grave consequences,’’ “Translation: for the surrender of Kherson.”
The security service, known by its Ukrainian initials S.B.U., is the country’s main domestic security and intelligence authority, Ukraine’s successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B. Its vast size has drawn criticism — by comparison, Britain’s MI5 has just 4,400 employees, according to the Atlantic Council — and it has long faced calls for reform.
Business groups have said that the service shook down companies for bribes and that corrupt agents, compromised and facing possible prosecution, became easy marks for recruitment by Russia.
“Surprise, surprise,” Serhiy Fursa, an analyst with Dragon Capital, a leading Ukrainian investment bank, wrote on Facebook of Mr. Zelensky’s charges of treachery in the service. “What lesson did this war give us? A corrupt man is Putin’s best friend.”