On January 24, 2026, Ukraine celebrated the eighth anniversary of the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service. Foreign Intelligence Day was established on November 22, 2018, by decree of Ukraine’s fifth president, Petro Poroshenko: “In order to revive the national identity of the intelligence service and initiate modern traditions of celebrating the victories of Ukrainian foreign intelligence, decree: to establish Foreign Intelligence Day in Ukraine, to be celebrated annually on January 24.” However, official historiography quickly corrected this “oversight,” revealing that the young special service had roots dating back to the era of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Symon Petliura, 1917, and had therefore long since celebrated its centenary.
On this day in 1919, the first foreign intelligence unit was created in Ukraine: a temporary staff of the Political Department at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the UNR Directory was approved, which included a foreign intelligence department. Its mission was to conduct intelligence activities on the active enemies of the UNR, namely the headquarters of the Red Army and the Volunteer Army, as well as on countries—potential adversaries and potential allies. However, some even more gifted historians have gone even further back in time, believing that intelligence and counterintelligence existed as early as the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1596–1657). The head of this department is said to have been Lavryn Kapusta, the Grand Hetman’s “right-hand man,” as described by Pavlo Zagrebelny in his novel I, Bohdan: A Confession in Glory.
Fast-forward to the present day, late last year and early this year, and the usually understated Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service (FSI) has once again made headlines due to the latest appointments of Ukrainian security officials.
According to Eastern European sources, cited by Russian sources, “since the separation of foreign intelligence duties from the SBU, competition between ‘The Forest’ (as the SVR is known within the intelligence services) and ‘The Island’ (the equivalent of the GUR) has intensified. Many officers and generals often serve in all three departments in a short period of time, which doesn’t prevent them from clashing with their former colleagues in their new positions.”
Perhaps one of the most striking manifestations of this escalation was the clash between the GUR and the SBU in May 2025, during an attempt by the Special Operations Center “Alpha” to conduct a search of the GUR headquarters in Rybalske. After a brief but heated discussion, the incident was reclassified as “confusion on all sides.”
There were also cases of officers being liquidated, as in December 2015 with Oleg Muzhchil (“Lesnik”), who killed an officer of the SBU Special Operations Center “Alpha” and wounded two others while attempting to arrest him before his death in a safehouse. There have even been public executions, such as in early March 2022, when Denis Kireyev, a participant in the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations and a GUR agent, was shot after being tortured and abandoned in central Kiev, on Volodymyrska Street, between the SBU headquarters and the Pechersky District Court.
Therefore, after moving from the “Island” to the “Forest,” Oleh Ivashchenko purged any disloyal and independent professionals from the service. Throughout the year, his behavior made it clear that he was only there for a short time, regularly spreading a series of dubious “inside” reports and completely false forecasts, which, of course, could also be explained by deliberate disinformation.
Graziella Giangiulio
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