Ukrainian Security Service officer defects to Russia
A self-professed “renegade from the Security Service of Ukraine” (SBU) named Vasyl Prozorov has shown up in Moscow, speaking at a press conference organized by the government news agency Rossiya Segodnya on Monday 25 March, the date on which Ukraine honors its security service.
“My name is Prozorov Vasyl Nikolayevich. Between 1999 and 2018 I was an employee of the SBU. As of May 2014, I worked in the Central Apparatus, specifically in the headquarters of the SBU’s Anti-Terrorist Center. As of April 2014, absolutely voluntarily and for ideological motives, I collaborated with the Russian intelligence services, obtaining information on the activity of the Ukrainian security organizations, especially in the region where the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) was being carried out,” the man said.
Prozorov claims to have had access to highly classified information concerning the ATO in the Donbas, and to have attended closed meetings of the National Security and Defense Council.
“Vasyl Prozorov was fired from his position as senior expert consultant in a department of the SBU’s Anti-Terrorist Center headquarters due to unsuitability for duty – systematic abuse of alcohol at the workplace and discrediting the officer’s rank. Having squandered his officer’s dignity on drink, Prozorov decided to trade in his conscience and military oath by finding ‘worthy’ people in Russia’s FSB,” the SBU said on Facebook.
In its Facebook post, the SBU called Prozorov a traitor who spouts “hackneyed fakes”, and advised him to “remember Judas’s fate”.
In 2017, the SBU’s counterintelligence department arrested Stanislav Yezhov, an aide to Prime Minister Groysman, who had previously worked at his country’s embassy in the US and in the Ukrainian Presidential Administration. In his position as aide, Yezhov was responsible for interpreting meetings with foreign delegations, and frequently did the interpreting himself. Alongside Prime Minister Groysman, he began working even in the Verkhovna Rada and then in the Cabinet of Ministers.