After months of flat denials, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence has admitted that Kyiv is carrying out a campaign of sabotage and assassination inside Russia. But why change the official line now?
Even if this is a good cop/bad cop routine, it still risks embarrassing the president, raising questions as to how far he is fully in control of HUR
Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), has become one of the media stars of this war, not least thanks to an artfully curated public persona that a senior US intelligence official characterised as ‘George Smiley meets Jason Bourne.’ This week he took advantage of interviews on two separate YouTube channels to acknowledge a Ukrainian role in a spate of recent attacks in Russia. He also announced that the Ukrainian parliamentarian Yevhen Shevchenko held secret negotiations with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, on behalf of the intelligence agencies.
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