President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the head of Ukraine’s state security service and the prosecutor general on Sunday for admitting the alleged treason and cooperation of dozens of their employees with Russian forces in the occupied territories.
Announcing the dismissals in his evening televised address, Zelensky said more than 60 officers belonging to the two law enforcement agencies “remained in the occupied territory and are working against our state.”
A total of 651 criminal proceedings have been opened for “treason and collaborationism”, he added.
“Such a set of crimes against the foundations of national security of the state and the links registered between Ukrainian security forces and Russian special services raise very serious questions for their respective leaders,” he said.
Zelensky used his sweeping wartime powers to remove Ivan Bakanov as head of the SBU’s intelligence and security service and Irina Venediktova, who as prosecutor general led investigations into war crimes by Russian forces after their full-scale invasion.
Bakanov is a former close ally of Zelensky who previously managed his television production company and his 2019 presidential campaign.
After Zelensky’s election victory, Bakanov was named security chief and tasked with cleaning up a sprawling service tainted by corruption and residual infiltration by Russian agents, despite his own lack of experience in government or law enforcement.
But he has fallen out of favor, particularly with the president, after failings at the service, which has about 30,000 employees and is an important branch of Ukraine’s armed forces. Politico reported last month that Zelensky wanted to fire Bakanov, citing officials close to the president and a Western official who had been advising Kyiv on SBU reform.
Ukrainian authorities charged three senior SBU officials from the southern Kherson region with treason last month after Russian forces swept through the territory, meeting little resistance.
Sergei Krivoruchko, head of the SBU directorate in Kherson, is said to have ordered his officers to evacuate the city against the president’s orders. Another senior SBU officer in the region, Igor Sadokhin, is said to have alerted Russian forces to the location of mines and air defenses.
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Before the February invasion, Zelensky faced criticism from Ukrainian activists and Western officials that he did not do enough to clean up Ukrainian law enforcement.
Under Venediktova, Ukrainian prosecutors appear to have made little progress in cracking down on corruption.
Although the EU granted Ukraine candidate status last month, it ruled that Kyiv would have to show a record of successful prosecutions and convictions in corruption cases to move on to the next stage.
The firings were another example of how Zelensky has tightened his grip on the levers of power during the war after martial law and censorship of electronic media.
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