Stock photo of a profile silhouette of a Russian man hacker with the Soviet Union flag in the background.
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Russia has activated a sleeper network of spies in Ukraine to exploit tensions, an official said.Oleksiy Danilov told The Times of London that they are spreading “false narratives” to sow division.Russian officials know “they cannot win” the war militarily, he said.
In recent months, Russia has activated a web of sleeper agents in Ukraine to try to exploit “so-called tensions” between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and military leaders, according to a Ukrainian official.
To trigger instability in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Russia has ordered its spies, some of whom have infiltrated Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, to spread “false narratives,” Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, told The Times of London.
He said their aim was to try to create divisions between political and military leaders.
Russian officials “realize they cannot win this militarily, so attempts at internal destabilization have become the priority,” Danilov said.
Danilov added that the SBU was never cleaned up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that “we recognise that we have not been able to clean up all of the security systems. So, of course there are traitors that exist there.”
Danilov told the newspaper that other tactics being deployed by the Russian agents include stirring up opposition to the government, setting up anti-war protests, and targeting soldiers’ relations.
Russia and Ukraine have struggled to make any significant breakthroughs in recent months along the 745-mile front.
Russia is now hoping that its spies’ covert operations can tip Ukraine over the edge and create a sense of “complete anarchy” similar to that of the Ukrainian War of Independence from 1917 to 1921, Danilov said in a recent op-ed for Ukrainska Pravda.
Danilov also said in his op-ed that Russia’s recent measures “pursue the goal of creating a critically negative public backdrop,” and that the planned subversive activities were to “undermine the public consensus of Ukrainian unity.”