Kirilo Budanov, chief of Ukrainian spies: ‘We have our own sources in offices closest to Putin’
Kirilo Budanov carries a gun in interviews with foreign journalists and talks about espionage during the war. Weapons and military equipment lie scattered on the floor of his Kiev office. He says he has “sources” close to Russian President Vladimir Putin: “We have our own sources. In (Putin’s) nearest offices, so to speak. So we usually know what’s going on.”
For an intelligence chief who ran Ukraine’s espionage operations during the war with Russia, Budanov, 37, has built an unusually public profile, using which to spread his message and threaten Russia from afar.
Nowadays, a spymaster can’t stay in the shadows, he says. “Without that, it’s no longer possible,” the head of Ukraine’s General Intelligence Directorate (GUR) said in an interview at his heavily defended headquarters in the capital. “And from now on all wars will be like this. In every country in the world. We can say that we are setting a trend.”
Ukraine has drawn conclusions about the need to get its message across since 2014, when Moscow surprised the world by seizing Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and unleashing a proxy war in the east, they say. “We completely lost the information war in 2014. And we started the war that started in (2022) in a very different way. And now the Russians are losing the information battle.”
Since a mutiny by mercenaries in Russia last month left Moscow’s system of government more opaque and unstable, Budanov has taken the opportunity to open up about what Ukraine’s spies know about their enemy.
Budanov claimed earlier this week that mutinous Russian mercenaries went to a nuclear base in search of a backpack-sized nuclear weapon. Several Russian sources who spoke to Portal confirmed parts of this account. Budanov also cited an intercepted poll by the Russian Interior Ministry, which he believed indicated that the mercenary leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had support inside Russia. He presented no evidence but said he accurately predicted Russia would invade the country last year before full-scale war broke out. “Who was right? We.”