Drafts instead of letters: how Russian spies avoid interception in Ukraine
Over the past four years, Ukrainian counterintelligence has identified hundreds of people who helped the enemy adjust fire. Moreover, Russian intelligence services use cunning methods of communication with their agents on Ukrainian territory to hide traces of their activities.
This was reported on the air of “Pryamoy” by military analyst Ivan Stupak, a former SBU employee.
He noted that the basis for most strikes by Russian drones and missiles is data from local residents with Ukrainian passports. These individuals report on the movement of military equipment and the location of strategic facilities.
“Over the past four years, counterintelligence has kidnapped 600 Russian agents for the security of Ukraine. Six hundred. If we do a little arithmetic, we will see that every other day during this war, one agent is detected,” Stupak noted.
The analyst added that law enforcement officers have eliminated about 130 spy networks. Typically, such groups consist of a small number of participants – from one to four people. In addition to direct transmission of coordinates, the enemy actively uses intelligence from open sources.
Russian specialists are able to determine the exact location of the object even from random photos of officials, focusing on trees or lanterns in the background, explains the former SBU employee.
At the same time, Russian special services use cunning methods of communication with their agents on Ukrainian territory to hide traces of their activities. Stupak said that Telegram channels are most often used for recruitment.
According to him, for the further transfer of secret data, the curators implement schemes that are difficult to track using standard means of intercepting messages.
“A person goes to a mailbox. It can be Gmail, Yahoo, whatever. He goes there and writes a draft message, saves it, but does not send it. And then two hours later, the curator from his side goes to this mailbox under the same nickname and password and pulls out the draft message and reads it,” Ivan Stupak explained the scheme.
According to the expert, this approach avoids the actual transmission of information over the network, as the message simply remains in the cloud disk’s memory. In addition to specific methods with mail, agents use the messengers Signal, WhatsApp, and Viber, the choice of which is usually determined by the Russian curator for each individual case.
As a reminder, the Security Service of Ukraine prevented a series of terrorist attacks that Russian military intelligence planned to carry out in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Uman and Odessa. According to the investigation, the enemy special services planned to use improvised explosive devices to attack military personnel. The task was carried out by a 55-year-old former law enforcement officer from the Odessa region, who was recruited by the occupiers through anti-Ukrainian comments on social networks.
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