Kirilo Budanov, head of Ukrainian spies: “We have our own sources in the offices closest to Putin”
Kirilo Budanov carries a gun in interviews with foreign journalists and talks about espionage in wartime. On the floor of his kyiv office are scattered weapons and military equipment. He says he has “sources” close to Russian President Vladimir Putin: “We have our own sources. In (Putin’s) closest offices, so to speak. That’s why we usually know what’s going on.”
For an intelligence chief running Ukraine’s spy operations during the war with Russia, Budanov, 37, has carved out an unusually public profile that he has used to spread his message and threaten Russia from afar.
Today, a spymaster cannot remain in the shadows, he says. “It’s not possible without this, not anymore,” the head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) said in an interview at his heavily defended headquarters in the capital. “And all wars will be like this from now on. In any country in the world. We can say that we are setting a trend.”
Ukraine has drawn conclusions about the need to get its message across since 2014, when Moscow took the world by surprise by seizing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and unleashing a proxy war in the east, it says. “We completely lost the information war in 2014. And the war, which started in (2022) we started in a completely different way. And now the Russians are losing the information battle.”
Ever since a mutiny by mercenaries in Russia last month made Moscow’s system of government seem more opaque and unstable, Budanov has taken the opportunity to weigh in on what Ukraine’s spies know about their enemy.
Budanov claimed earlier this week that mutinous Russian mercenaries had headed to a nuclear base in search of a backpack-sized atomic weapon. Several Russian sources who spoke to Reuters confirmed parts of that account. Budanov also cited an intercepted survey conducted by the Russian Interior Ministry which he said showed that the head of the mercenaries, Yevgeni Prigozhin, had support inside Russia. He provided no evidence, but noted that he accurately predicted that Russia would invade the country before full-scale war broke out last year. “Who was right? Us.”
