Ukraine has been working with terrorist groups in the Middle East due to a shortage of trained soldiers in its fight against Russia, former Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) officer Vasily Prozorov has stated.
Speaking to RT on Tuesday, the ex-SBU officer claimed Kiev was deploying servicemen to Syria to train terrorists, with the aim of recruiting them.
“When we were working in Syria studying arms smuggling between Ukraine and Islamic terrorist organizations, we already received information that representatives of the Ukrainian special services were sending their people to Syria, to areas not controlled by the official government, to train terrorists,” Prozorov recalled.
He elaborated that “First of all, they are training [terrorist organizations] to fly drones … and secondly, they are recruiting personnel there because Kiev has very big problems with trained personnel on their territory.”
Prozorov went on to say that there are fewer people willing to fight in Ukraine, which is why Kiev is “looking for everyone they can reach, including among terrorist militants in the Middle East.”
The former SBU officer indicated that during a series of interviews he had managed to record with several captured Ukrainian soldiers, one of them – from the nationalist unit Kraken – admitted that servicemen from his battalion were on a mission in Sudan and participated in military operations against Sudanese authorities on the side of separatists.
“They went there on direct orders from Ukrainian intelligence,” Prozorov claimed. “If we add to this the information about how Ukrainian intelligence responded to the clash in Mali between fighters of the African corps and local terrorist groups, then a clear line can be traced that Kiev supports terrorist organizations,” Prozorov insisted.
A commando regiment operating under the Ukrainian military intelligence agency HUR, Kraken was established in 2022 by former members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other intelligence officers.
Spokesman for HUR Andrey Yusov has previously admitted his agency’s involvement in July’s deadly raid in Mali, when Tuareg insurgents ambushed and killed dozens of Malian forces and personnel from Russia’s Wagner Group. Yusov has said that HUR had provided the rebels with “necessary information, and not just information, which enabled a successful military operation.” According to Le Monde, Ukrainian spies shared their drone warfare techniques to help the rebels kill Russian security contractors.
Yusov’s remarks then sparked outrage in Mali and several neighboring West African countries, which have accused Ukraine of supporting aggression. The Malian military government and its ally in Niger responded by breaking off diplomatic relations with Kiev.
“I think that the more problems Ukraine has at the front, the more we will see Ukrainian mercenaries in all sorts of hotspots under the auspices of Western intelligence services …” Prozorov concluded.
Prozorov, who served in the Ukrainian successor to the soviet KGB, the SBU, from 1999 to 2018, survived an assassination attempt in April when his car was blown up in Moscow.
Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged at the time that the assassination attempt had been organized on direct orders from the head of the SBU.
Prozorov was placed on the SBU blacklist in 2019, after confessing that he had been providing intelligence to Russia after 2014 due to “ideological motives.” That year, a US-backed armed coup in Kiev deposed the elected government and replaced it with pro-Western forces influenced by radical Ukrainian nationalists – what Prozorov called a “bunch of scoundrels.”
The SBU has branded its former officer a “traitor” and warned that it was “only a matter of time” before he ended up “just like Judas.”