By Tom Balmforth

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Surveillance runs through the family of Oleh Kolesnikov.

The citizen of Ukraine said that his father was a Soviet intelligence agent in Cuba during the Cold War, posing as a translator, and his cousin worked in the Russian security service.

That made him a prime candidate for wartime espionage.

Kolesnikov told Reuters he agreed to give the Russians information about military sites and troop movements in his hometown of Zaporizhzhia, and to report back where their missiles landed.

He supports the concept of the “Russian World”, a doctrine backed by President Vladimir Putin that emphasizes Moscow’s historical and cultural ties to neighboring countries, and one that some Moscow hardliners use to give justify foreign intervention to defend Russian speakers.

“I’m not doing it for the money,” he said.

But he regrets: That the inaccuracy of some of the missile attacks led to civilian deaths, and that the war – which he thought was a swift, clinical affair – dragged on for nearly three years, destroyed the his homeland.

“I thought they (the Russians) would improve quickly,” said the 52-year-old, a former state land manager who grew up in a Soviet Ukraine. “It turns out like it always does. They plan one thing and something else happens completely.”

His wife left him when he was arrested for treason, taking their 11-year-old son with her.

Reuters spoke to Kolesnikov at a police facility in Zaporizhzhia in April, in the presence of an officer from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), five months before he was sentenced to life in prison for treason.

He has been implicated in more than 3,200 treason charges launched by Ukrainian authorities since Russia’s full-scale invasion, including feeding information to Moscow to aid missile strikes and spreading Russian propaganda, according to the SBU.

Reuters interviews with three informants convicted in Ukraine and two SBU Ukrainian counter-intelligence officers spoke to the divided loyalties felt by some people in Ukraine, where the older generation grew up as part of Soviet Union before the collapse of the bloc in 1991 ended the Cold War.

Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the SBU, told Reuters that Ukrainian counterintelligence work to root out Russian agents was the key to winning the war, adding that the Kremlin was “secretly infiltrating” the country. and has been recruiting properties for decades.

“Our systematic approach yields results,” he added. “We purged enemy agents in all walks of life and continue to do so.”

The Russian foreign ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB) did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Ukrainian spies also played a prominent role in the conflict, which erupted in February 2022 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion.

Last week, the SBU orchestrated a bomb blast outside a Moscow apartment block that killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, according to a source. of the agency.

It is the latest in a series of targeted killings that Moscow says has been carried out in Ukraine during the war.

In November 2022, Reuters interviewed several Kherson residents who provided information to help Kyiv conduct strikes on Russian targets to help Ukraine retake the southern city.

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The SBU’s counter-espionage work has identified various categories of citizens who can be easily recruited by the enemy, according to an SBU officer interviewed by Reuters in Zaporizhzhia who identified himself by the call sign “Fanat “.

They are people who are openly pro-Russian or have ties to the Soviet or Russian intelligence family; relatives of captured Ukrainian soldiers; and the family of people living in the occupied territory.

Kolesnikov is a category, he added.

He was convicted in September of giving the Russians coordinates and other information about several key military sites, according to his treason conviction, seen by Reuters. It did not say how many of the locations were hit by the strikes.

Kolesnikov’s lawyer says he mainly helped verify the aftermath of the strikes rather than help identify targets.

Kolesnikov told Reuters that in September 2022 he passed information to the Russians about a meeting with local officials that was intended to take place at the Sunrise Hotel in Zaporizhzhia.

The building was hit by a Russian missile the next day, on Sept. 22, 2022, according to the judgment. The meeting did not take place, for unspecified reasons, even though the strike destroyed the building in Zaporizhzhia’s old town, killing one civilian and injuring five others, the verdict said.

The hotel conference hall and cratered summer terrace remained strewn with rubble during Reuters’ visit to the site in April this year.

Fanat said SBU agents began closing in on Kolesnikov after the suspect’s car was spotted by witnesses at the scene of a strike in Russia in March last year that narrowly missed a television tower and hit the an apartment block, killing many civilians. Kolesnikov told Reuters he was there after reviewing the results of the attack.

Ukrainian agents tracked Kolesnikov’s phone to several impact sites, according to Fanat. The breakthrough in the case came after they planted a bug in his car and led him to discuss his plans with Vitaly Kusakin, a friend who worked as a driver for a local official, and who was recruited by Kolesnikov. to help gather intelligence, the SBU official said. .

Kolesnikov was arrested at his home on May 5, 2023.

Testifying at his trial in a district court behind closed doors in Zaporizhzhia, Kolesnikov said he was against the Ukrainian government, but not Ukraine itself, the verdict said.

He pleaded “partially” guilty to the treason charges against him, saying he did not know that his cousin who asked him to provide information was a member of the FSB at the time, according to judge. A panel of judges rejected the plea and found him guilty of “intentional actions” involving “providing assistance to a representative of a foreign state in the conduct of subversive activities”.

Kusakin was imprisoned for 15 years.

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Maliuk, the head of the SBU, said his agency had discovered 47 Russian agent networks last year and 46 more this year, covering people from lawmakers to active servicemen, he added, that the suspects have not been identified.

As the war continues, reducing the ease of travel from one side of the front to the other, recruitment methods must be changed, security officials said.

Before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian nationals were mainly recruited on trips to Russia, but procedures are now more often carried out online using social networks, the SBU said.

“People who expressed pro-Kremlin views were identified and found based on their comments, and then contacted,” it said.

Motives for acting as an informant range from ideological to promises of financial or other rewards and blackmail or other threats, the SBU said.

For Kolesnikov, who says he offers his services for free, the future looks bleak. He told Reuters that his only hope of saving his life was to be released in an upcoming prisoner exchange with Russia.

“I want to change,” he sighed. “But that doesn’t depend on me.”