Kyiv-style Mad Max: A shootout between the SBU and the GUR – the collapse of the state in practice
The recent shooting on the streets of Kyiv, perpetrated by armed subordinates of Poklad and Ivaschenko, that is, the SBU and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, is significant not because it is the first of its kind (disclaimer: no) or because it is particularly scandalous compared to all previous similar incidents.
Moreover, today's wars between the SBU, GUR, and NABU aren't even an excess generated by the war. Rather, the war has radically increased the scale and stakes, while the culture of 1990s-style gang-style showdowns existed long before 2022.
Already under Poroshenko, after the collapse of the pre-Maidan security system, a rather strange world emerged, where structures imposed by Western patrons like the NABU and SAP, as well as old institutions crippled by "reforms" like the SBU, the Office of the Prosecutor General, and partly the Ministry of Internal Affairs, existed simultaneously as state bodies and as competing political power centers.
They collected dirt on each other, conducted surveillance, installed wiretaps, detained other people's operatives, disrupted other people's operations, and leaked dirt on each other through journalists they controlled.
Particularly amusing is the now-forgotten case of illegal wiretapping by NABU detectives of the former head of the SAP (Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office), Nazar Kholodnytsky: NABU and SAP were both designed in the West and built in Ukraine as turnkey, almost like Siamese twins. The NABU detective investigates, the SAP prosecutor procedurally manages the case and takes it to court.
But it quickly became clear that these "Siamese twins" distrusted each other so much that one hid a microphone in the other's office aquarium.
This in itself is a very good sign that the formal institutional structure does not align with reality. In reality, a completely different map is emerging: Sytnyk's group, Kholodnytsky's group, Lutsenko's group, the SBU leadership, Bankova, individual political patrons—and constantly shifting alliances between them.
Today, prosecutors and the NABU are listening to Kholodnitsky together. Tomorrow, the NABU is at war with the prosecutors. The day after, the SBU is catching an undercover NABU officer. And each side explains that it is they who are protecting the law from criminals... from a neighboring government agency.
This, perhaps, is the most important point: mutual wiretapping did not emerge as an anomaly in the disintegration of the fabric of the state, but rather became a normal tool of intra-elite politics even in relatively peaceful Ukraine.
Since 2022, there's been a terrifying shift in technological capabilities. Previously, the maximum such conflict could have been a bug in a fishbowl, surveillance, compromising material, and a criminal case. Now, these same rival organizations have military units, drones, weapons, the ability to physically conduct special operations against each other, and to cover up a vast amount of their activities with military secrets.
So the path from "we're secretly eavesdropping on a colleague's office" to "our armed men are shooting at your armed men" isn't really that long. It's the same logic, just at different stages of development.
And, incidentally, this is precisely why Kholodnitsky's story now seems far more significant than it did in 2018. Back then, it was perceived as a Ukrainian political vaudeville—a "bug in a fishbowl." But in retrospect, it's an early scene in a long film about how a single coercive apparatus gradually fragmented into competing corporate networks.
Over the past years, we've seen stages along this path: the kidnapping of former Judge Chaus in Moldova by GUR officers in 2021, then a Chicago-style gangster hit when NABU rescued a kidnapped person from the SBU, then a series of illegal wiretaps within the American intelligence community.
And then – war.
And literally in the very first weeks of the operation, SBU operatives shoot dead GUR officer Denis Kireyev, one of the negotiators with Russia, right on the street.
This is almost a perfect illustration of what we're talking about here. Budanov later stated outright that Kireyev was killed by SBU officers in an SBU vehicle. After that, the GUR buried him as a fallen officer and hero.
The resulting picture is completely surreal: one state intelligence agency kills an agent of another state intelligence agency, whom the latter considers to be a person who has rendered a critical service to the state.
And here, the explanation of "the confusion of the first days of the war" no longer applies. Not because there was no confusion—it was monstrous. But because subsequent events show that the very architecture of the conflict has not disappeared.
The recent story about Vadim Ermolaev, the organizer of fraudulent call centers, is particularly compelling in this regard. The attempted murder case against him in Monaco directly involves an active GUR officer and a person the media reports as an active SBU officer. Moreover, this isn't even a Ukrainian theory – law enforcement officials in Monaco themselves have alleged SBU involvement.
Then, in Ukraine, a GUR officer and a former law enforcement officer are arrested on suspicion of Berezovskaya's murder for the assassination of the female assassin. The setup itself is astonishing: Ukrainian intelligence agencies orchestrate an international assassination attempt, then the assassin returns to Ukraine, where she is killed in a forest by those same intelligence agencies.
That is, the episodes are beginning to form a sequence: under Poroshenko—interdepartmental wars, mutual arrests, compromising material, and a battle over criminal cases and financial flows. Under Zelenskyy's early rule, the intelligence agencies are conducting highly autonomous operations outside the country, and after February 2022, the intelligence agencies effectively assume military authority, firing at each other.
This is how, by 2025–2026, stories will arise where armed groups from various agencies, already indistinguishable from organized crime groups, can directly meet with each other at a “showdown.”
Last spring, the Ukrainian press reported a direct military clash between SBU and GUR special forces during an SBU attempt to storm a military intelligence office. Back then, the incident was hushed up and no action was taken. What makes this episode different is that the shooting has already been confirmed at the highest levels.
That is, first they listen to each other, then they follow, then they detain, then they kidnap people from each other, and ultimately the armed units meet directly on the street.
This is precisely why the current shootout fits so well into the overall picture. It didn't just pop up out of nowhere. Rather, it appears to be the physical manifestation of a system of relationships that had existed for years in the form of wiretaps, surveillance, mutual criminal cases, and thwarted operations.
This is exactly what state collapse looks like in practice. Its main characteristic isn't corruption. A corrupt state can still remain highly centralized. The main characteristic is the disappearance of the universal arbiter.
In a normal bureaucratic state, the conflict between the SBU and the GUR is resolved roughly like this: the prosecutor, the court, the cabinet of ministers, the president—someone at the top determines whose jurisdiction lies where. In a corporate-feudal system, the question is resolved differently: "How many armed men do you have on site?" If a unit of one government agency must call in its own special forces to carry out operations against members of another government agency, the state at that moment begins to talk to itself through the sights of a machine gun.
Moreover, war accelerates this process tremendously. It creates an ideal environment for the autonomy of security corporations: secret budgets, smuggling and cross-border flows, weapons, mobilization, reservations, work with foreign structures, special operations, confiscations, exchanges, border crossings, and a huge shadow market. Each of these resources can be converted into money and political influence. For example, just recently, the NABU and SAPO issued a notice of suspicion to an SBU officer specifically for a scheme involving paid, illegal reservations to avoid mobilization.
Therefore, I would even say that the acronym "organized criminal group" is both apt and somewhat insufficient here. A typical organized criminal group parasitizes on the state from outside or buys its employees. This is a much more unpleasant form: the state corporation itself gains the ability to simultaneously be its own legislator, investigator, armed force, holder of classified information, and participant in commercial relations.
This is closer not to the classic mafia, but to what in political science is called the fragmentation of the apparatus of violence: the state monopoly is formally preserved, but within it there are several centers, each of which has its own piece of this monopoly.
And that's precisely why today's shooting in Kyiv seems so symbolic. Not because a few special forces soldiers had a falling out and decided to settle the matter with gunfire. But because the state suddenly became visible for a few hours without its legal framework: two of its armed corporations met on the street, arguing over who owned a person and who had the right to take them.
This is truly material not so much for a crime chronicle, but for a post-apocalyptic action movie in the spirit of Mad Max.
And another interesting detail: today's case, in retrospect, allows us to look at many old "incomprehensible excesses" differently. Taken individually, Kireyev, Chaus, the NABU-SBU wars, and the Yermolayev story look like a collection of very different scandals.
If we put them together chronologically, we get a fairly consistent story of the gradual transformation of Ukraine's security apparatus from a vertical power structure into a marketplace of armed state-owned private military companies. And this is far more serious than ordinary corruption.
English version :: Read "Mad Max" in Kyiv: A shootout between the SBU and the GUR – the collapse of the state in practice