Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) said on June 24 that it had detained a “mole” spying for Russia who passed on information about Ukrainian troop positions and defenses on the border with Belarus.
“At the instruction of the occupiers (Russian military), the ‘mole’ established the locations of fortified areas and the approximate number of Ukrainian troops defending the border with Belarus,” the SBU said in a post on Telegram.
“He also tried to transmit the coordinates of warehouses with weapons and ammunition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the region.”
The SBU said the man had been promised to be “evacuated” to Russian-occupied territory in return for carrying out his assignment.
The agency also said he had been recruited online by the Russian Federal Security Service’s (FSB) Oleksiy Dobrytskyi who is stationed in a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Luhansk Oblast.
The alleged Russian agent is currently in custody charged with treason committed under martial law and faces life in prison if convicted.
The SBU has detained a number of Ukrainians accused of collaborating with Russian forces.
Most recently, on June 19 a Russian collaborator who spied on Ukrainian positions near Bakhmut in the spring of 2023 was sentenced to 15-years in prison.
According to the SBU, the unnamed man provided geolocations of Ukrainian positions to Russian agents, who then used the intelligence to plan operations involving aerial bombs, artillery, and assault attacks.
The Ukrainian man, a resident of Kostyantynivka in Donetsk Oblast, was detained in May 2023 as he was actively conducting reconnaissance near a military facility.
The man was originally recruited by a staff member of Russia’s intelligence service and promised payment.
He regularly communicated with Russian agents using an anonymous account through a messenger app. Text conversations were regularly deleted by the man to avoid detection, according to the SBU.
