Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday fired the head of the influential Ukrainian domestic security agency, the SBU, and the country’s attorney general, citing hundreds of suspicions of collaboration with Russia by their subordinates.
The resignations of SBU chief Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend of Zelensky’s, and attorney general Irina Venediktova, who played a key role in prosecuting war crimes against the Russians, were announced in executive orders posted on the government’s website.
This is the resignation of the country’s highest officials since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, forcing the entire Ukrainian state machine to focus on the war effort.
Over Telegram, Zelensky said that 651 cases of alleged treason and collaboration had been opened against prosecutors and police, and that more than 60 employees of Bakanov and Venediktova’s agencies are already known to be working against Ukraine in Russian-occupied territories.
The high number of cases of treason reveals the enormous challenge of Russian infiltration facing Ukraine. “Such a series of crimes against the national security foundations of the state raises very serious questions,” the president said. “Each of these questions will receive an adequate answer,” he said.
Russian troops captured and managed to maintain control of parts of southern and eastern Ukraine since the beginning of the war. It remains unclear how the southern Kherson region fell so quickly into Russian hands, in contrast to fierce resistance around Kiev, which repelled Moscow’s forces and forced the Kremlin to focus on capturing the Donbass region. , in the east.
In a speech broadcast to the public, Zelensky highlighted the recent arrest on suspicion of treason by the former head of the SBU who oversaw the Crimea region, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, which Kiev and Western powers still view as Ukrainian territory.
“Sufficient evidence has been collected to indict this person on suspicion of treason. All his criminal activities are documented,” the Ukrainian president said.
Bakanov was appointed to head the SBU in 2019, one of a series of new faces that rose to prominence after Zelensky, a former comedian, won elections earlier that year.
To replace Venediktova, the president on Sunday appointed Oleksi Simonenko as the new attorney general.
