Covert strikes across Russia and beyond are reshaping a conflict that shows no signs of letting up.
David Ignatius
June 5, 2025
The Washington Post
Ukraine’s daring drone attack against Russian air bases last weekend delivered “a serious slap in the face of the power … of the Russian Federation,” as Lt. Gen. Vasyl Malyuk, the head of SBU, Ukraine’s security service, boasted after the operation. Some Ukraine supporters hoped the strikes might mark a breakthrough in the war.
But what’s ahead appears to be a bloody continuation of this terrible conflict. President Donald Trump, who came into office promising to settle the war, on Thursday glibly compared it to “two young children fighting like crazy in a park. Sometimes, you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”
With Trump stepping back as a peacemaker, at least for now, Ukraine will depend more than ever on its intelligence services, which have shown an ability to strike Russian forces deep inside their home country and around the world. The front line inside Ukraine will remain a hellscape of drones and artillery. But covert operations could expand into a “dirty war” beyond the front, with more targeted killings, sabotage, and strikes on countries that supply arms to Ukraine and Russia, respectively.
Both sides have long wanted to break out of the stalemated war of attrition, and Sunday’s “Operation Spiderweb” was a bold Ukrainian attempt to reset the table. Malyuk said preparation for the coordinated attacks across Russia’s vast territory began 18 months ago. Other sophisticated operations are in the works, intelligence sources tell me.
The SBU and the GUR, Ukraine’s two spy agencies, have been working for more than three years to deliver on the motto of Ukraine’s special forces: “I’m coming for you.” They have run operations to take the battle into Russia — and abroad against its forces and partners around the world. The goal has been to strike in unexpected locations through devious means and make Russia bleed far beyond the front lines in Ukraine.
The SBU and GUR have an intense rivalry, much like the decades-old competition between the FBI and the CIA. The SBU, responsible for internal security but also active outside the country, was plagued for years by claims that it was penetrated by Russia. That’s why Sunday’s complex operation was such a coup: It didn’t get leaked. Intelligence sources told me that Malyuk had informed President Volodymyr Zelensky, but not some other top members of his administration. Malyuk didn’t even tell a key deputy, the sources said.
A sign of the SBU-GUR rivalry is that on May 30, just two days before the SBU drone attack on air bases, GUR operatives launched an attack on an army base at Desantnaya Bay, near Vladivostok in the Russian Far East — the most distant target yet in the war.
The Vladivostok attack involved a combination of truck bombs and drones, intelligence sources told me, with the drones mostly used for diversion. The target was the 155th Marine Brigade, which has fought at Mariupol and in other Ukraine battles, according to the Kyiv Independent, to which GUR sources confirmed the attack.
The SBU, beyond trucking the ingenious containers carrying small quadcopters into Russia, has also taken the lead on naval drones that forced the Russian navy to retreat in the Black Sea. European intelligence officers have helped with the design of these sea drones, sources told me.
Ukraine has considered a naval version of the sneak-attack tactic it used so effectively on Sunday. The sources said the SBU weighed sending sea drones hidden in cargo containers to attack ships of Russia and its allies in the North Pacific. But, so far, they apparently have yet to launch these operations.
A big target for the SBU has been the bridge spanning the Kerch Strait and connecting Russia to occupied Crimea. SBU operatives have struck the bridge three times since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, most recently in a big underwater blast on Tuesday. The heavily protected bridge is a prime symbolic target for Ukraine — another way of delivering a “slap.”
The GUR, headed by the charismatic Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, has run extensive operations into Russia and against Russian forces around the world. He told me in an interview last year: “We’ve offered a plan aimed at reduction of Russian potential. It encompasses a lot of aspects, like the military industry, critical military targets, their airfields, their command-and-control posts.”
One GUR tactic has been to strike Russian mercenary forces from the Wagner Group in Africa. A GUR-organized strike last July killed 84 Wagner fighters and 47 Malian soldiers, according to the BBC. Budanov had told me: “We conduct such operations aimed at reducing Russian military potential, anywhere where it’s possible. Why should Africa be an exception?”
Intelligence sources described several GUR operations in South Africa to disrupt weapons shipments to Russia. In December 2022, GUR agents discovered that a Russian cargo ship, the Lady R, had docked at the Simon’s Town naval base to receive what the sources said was a shipment of weapons. The GUR passed the information to the United States, and the U.S. ambassador in Pretoria made a public protest in May 2023. GUR agents also disrupted a weapons transfer to a Russian cargo plane that visited South Africa in 2022, the sources said.
When the Smolnyy, a Russian naval training ship, docked at Cape Town in August, Ukrainians sharply protested. Sources told me that some GUR officers considered attacking the ship but held back.
Ukraine’s readiness to launch risky spy operations has produced recurring tension between Washington and Kyiv, U.S. and Ukrainian sources told me. One example was the August 2022
assassination of Daria Dugina, the daughter of a Russian writer who has been a prominent advocate of the war with Ukraine (and was the likely target). U.S. intelligence learned that Ukrainian spies had organized the plot and told them Washington strongly opposed such actions, according to the New York Times.
The countries bordering Ukraine might become new battlegrounds as the war continues. An example is Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova on Ukraine’s western border that is aligned with Moscow and hosts a Russian “peacekeeping” force. Using Russian defectors and other local forces, Ukraine considered an operation to attack the Russian troops there but decided against opening this new front.
Now, Russia is considering sending 10,000 additional troops to Transnistria and seeks to destabilize pro-Western Moldova, the Moldovan prime minister claimed in an interview with the Financial Times this week.
The spillover danger affects all the other countries bordering Ukraine: Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania — as well as Germany, the Baltic states, and Norway and Finland beyond. Most of these countries support Ukraine, and the Ukrainian intelligence services use Eastern European capitals as hubs for their operations. It’s all too easy to imagine a widening campaign of Russian sabotage and assassination threats such as those that began last year.
When Trump took office, he appeared to think it would be easy to end this war. He got his answer this week when Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Istanbul. Russia’s terms amounted to demanding Ukraine’s capitulation. According to a Tass report, Russia’s negotiating memorandum seeks “Ukraine’s neutrality, which means its pledge not to join military alliances and coalitions, a ban on any military activity and on the deployment of foreign military forces.”
Ukraine won’t be “forced to be neutral,” it said in its own sheet of terms. “It can choose to be part of the Euro-Atlantic community and move toward E.U. membership.” That, in essence, is what this war is about.
Trump spoke on Thursday about the terrible carnage of this war, describing gruesome intelligence photos he had seen of severed limbs and shattered bodies. Those aren’t children “fighting in a park.” As the president steps back, the body count continues to climb.
David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. Ignatius has written 11 spy novels: “The Paladin” (2020), “The Quantum Spy,” (2017), “The Director,” (2014), “Bloodmoney” (2011), “The Increment” (2009), “Body of Lies” (2007), “The Sun King” (1999), “A Firing Offense” (1997), “The Bank of Fear” (1994), “SIRO” (1991), and “Agents of Innocence” (1987). “Body of Lies” was made into a 2008 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe. Ignatius joined The Post in 1986 as editor of its Sunday Outlook section. In 1990 he became foreign editor, and in 1993, assistant managing editor for business news. He began writing his column in 1998 and continued even during a three-year stint as executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Earlier in his career, Ignatius was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering at various times the steel industry, the
Departments of State and Justice, the CIA, the Senate and the Middle East. Education: Harvard College; Kings College, Cambridge. Ignatius grew up in Washington, D.C., and studied political theory at Harvard College and economics at Kings College, Cambridge. He lives in Washington with his wife and has three daughters. Honors and Awards: 2018 Finalist team, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service; 2018 George Polk Award; 2010 Urbino International Press Award; 2013 Overseas Press Club Award for Foreign Affairs Commentary; Lifetime Achievement Award, International Committee for Foreign Journalists; Legion D’Honneur awarded by the French government; 2004 Edward Weintal Prize; 2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary; As The Post’s foreign editor, Ignatius supervised the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.