The Ukrainian President wants to continue cleaning up the domestic secret service SBU. After the dismissal of the previous boss, another 28 officials are now to go. In addition, the pace towards collaborators with the Russian military is tightened.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced the dismissal of 28 employees of the Ukrainian secret service SBU. It's about posts and functions of different levels, "but the reasons are similar: unsatisfactory work results," said Selenskyj in his daily video address. The day before he had already suspended his secret service chief and childhood friend Ivan Bakanov and the Attorney General Iryna Venediktova. In the course of the month, he applied to Parliament for Bakanov's dismissal and appointed his previous deputy Vasyl Maljuk as interim head of the SBU.
In the evening, Zelenskyi promised a revision of the entire work of the secret service. The Ukrainian President recently expressed his anger at the fact that more than 60 employees of the SBU and the General Prosecutor's Office remained in the occupied territories. Kyiv sees this as high treason.
However, the media also pointed out that the 47-year-old Bakanov, as a non-specialist, enjoyed little authority among his employees. Bakanov had previously worked with Zelenskyj as a television producer, among other things, and later headed his campaign team.
At the same time, it became known that Ukraine also wants to step up the fight against enemy artillery observers. Again and again, Ukrainians are said to betray the positions of their own troops to the enemy and correct enemy artillery fire. The instruction to take action against such traitors comes directly from the president, said his security adviser Oleksiy Danilov. The military governor of the Mykolayiv region, which was badly hit by Russian shelling, Vitaly Kim had previously offered a bounty of $100 (almost €100) for the capture of artillery observers.
