Zaporizhzhia. Espionage runs in the family for Oleh Kolesnikov.
The Ukrainian national said his father was a Soviet intelligence agent in Cuba during the Cold War, posing as a translator, and that his cousin works with the Russian security service.
That made him a prime candidate for wartime espionage.
Kolesnikov told Reuters he agreed to provide the Russians with information on military locations and troop movements in his hometown of Zaporizhzhia, and report back on where their missiles had landed.
He had supported the concept of the “Russian world,” a doctrine supported by President Vladimir Putin that emphasizes Moscow’s historical and cultural ties to neighboring countries, and one that some Moscow hardliners have used to justify intervention abroad to defend Russian speakers.
“I didn’t do this for money,” he said.
But he lamented: That the inaccuracy of some missile strikes led to civilian deaths, and that the war — which he had assumed would be a quick, clinical affair — has dragged on for nearly three years and destroyed his homeland.
“I thought they (the Russians) would advance quickly,” said the 52-year-old, a former state land manager who grew up in a Soviet Ukraine. “It turned out like it always does. They plan one thing and another thing happens completely.”
His wife left him when he was arrested for treason, taking their 11-year-old child with her.
Reuters spoke to Kolesnikov at a police facility in Zaporizhzhia in April, in the presence of an official from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), five months before he was sentenced to life in prison for treason.
His is among more than 3,200 cases of treason brought by Ukrainian authorities since Russia’s full-scale invasion, including feeding information to Moscow to aid missile strikes and spreading Russian propaganda, according to the SBU.
Reuters interviews with three informants convicted by Ukraine and two Ukrainian counterintelligence officers from the SBU spoke to the divided loyalties felt by some people in Ukraine, where older generations grew up part of the Soviet Union before the bloc’s breakup in 1991 ended the Cold War.
Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the SBU, told Reuters that Ukrainian counterintelligence work to root out Russian agents was key to victory in the war, adding that the Kremlin had been “covertly infiltrating” the country and recruiting assets for decades.
“Our systematic approach is paying off,” he added. “We have purged enemy agents in all walks of life and continue to do so.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry and the Federal Security Service (FSB) did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Ukrainian spies have also played a prominent role in the conflict, which erupted in February 2022 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion.
Last week, the SBU orchestrated a bomb blast outside a Moscow apartment building that killed Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection troops, according to a source at the agency.
It was the latest in a series of targeted killings that Moscow says Ukraine has carried out during the war.
In November 2022, Reuters interviewed several residents of Kherson who provided information to help Kiev launch attacks on Russian targets to help Ukraine retake the southern city.
The SBU’s counterintelligence work has identified various categories of citizens prone to enemy recruitment, according to an SBU officer interviewed by Reuters in Zaporizhzhia who identified himself by the call sign “Fanat.”
They are people who were openly pro-Russian or who have family connections to Soviet or Russian intelligence; relatives of captured Ukrainian soldiers; and the family of people living in occupied territory.
Kolesnikov was category one, he added.
He was convicted in September of providing the Russians with the coordinates and other information of dozens of primarily military sites, according to his treason conviction, seen by Reuters. It did not say how many of those locations were affected by strikes.
Kolesnikov’s lawyer said he mainly helped verify the aftermath of strikes rather than help identify targets.
Kolesnikov told Reuters that in September 2022 he passed on information to the Russians about a meeting with local officials that was supposed to take place at the Sunrise Hotel in Zaporizhzhia.
The building was hit by a Russian missile the next day, on September 22, 2022, according to the ruling. The meeting did not take place, for unspecified reasons, even though the strike destroyed the building in Zaporizhzhia’s old town, killed one civilian and injured five others, the ruling said.
The hotel’s conference hall and cratered summer terrace remained strewn with rubble during a Reuters visit to the site in April this year.
Fanat said SBU agents began closing in on Kolesnikov after the suspect’s car was spotted by witnesses at the scene of a Russian strike last March that narrowly missed a television tower and hit an apartment building, killing several civilians. Kolesnikov told Reuters he was there afterwards checking the results of the attack.
Ukrainian agents traced Kolesnikov’s phone to multiple impact sites, according to Fanat. The breakthrough in the case came after they planted a bug in his car and over him discussing his plans with Vitaly Kusakin, a friend who worked as a driver for a local official, and whom Kolesnikov had recruited to help gather intelligence, the SBU said – the officer. .
Kolesnikov was arrested at his home on May 5, 2023.
Testifying at his trial at a district court in Zaporizhzhia behind closed doors, Kolesnikov said he was opposed to the Ukrainian government, but not Ukraine itself, the verdict said.
He pleaded “partially” guilty to the treason charges against him, saying he had not known that his cousin who asked him to provide information was a member of the FSB at the time, according to the verdict. A panel of judges rejected that plea, finding him guilty of “intentional acts” involving “providing assistance to a representative of a foreign state in the conduct of subversive activities”.
Kusakin has been imprisoned for 15 years.
Spy rings and prisoner swaps
Maliuk, the head of the SBU, said his agency had uncovered 47 Russian agent networks last year and 46 more this year, made up of people from lawmakers to active military, he added, without identifying the suspects.
As the war has raged on, reducing the ease of travel from one side of the front to the other, recruitment methods have had to change, security officials said.
Before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian citizens were recruited mainly during trips to Russia, but approaches are now more often made online using social networks, the SBU said.
“People expressing pro-Kremlin views are identified and found based on their comments, and then contacted,” it said.
Motives for acting as informants range from ideological to promises of financial or other rewards and blackmail or other threats, the SBU said.
For Kolesnikov, who says he provided his services freely, the future looks bleak. He told Reuters his only hope of saving his life was to be released in a future prisoner swap with Russia.
“I would like to be traded,” he sighed. “But it’s not up to me.”
