The drone that struck the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in central Kyiv on September 4 was guided from inside the country, a presidential adviser believes.

Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, wrote on Facebook that in his personal opinion the Shahed was "controlled and guided online via a Mesh radio repeater with internet access, which a Russian agent switched on somewhere nearby (within 5 km) for a short period during the attack". Such a repeater, he said, is about half the size of a school backpack. Ukrainska Pravda reported the post.

Flight tracking data of the drone’s path released online appears to confirm that the drone was launched inside Ukraine.

There were no other Shaheds airborne at the time, Beskrestnov said, which in his reading made control through a relay chain from Russia impossible.

The unknown in the report is that it was a “Russian operative” that controlled the drone, as no evidence of that claim has been presented.

A Russian strike on a government building in the middle of Kyiv would be highly unusual and has never happened so prominently before. Both sides in the conflict have plenty of exposed ministries and important government buildings, and to date have refrained from targeting each other prestigious buildings.

Moreover, the drone strike on the SBU building comes two days after officers of the SBU and the military intelligence service, HUR, ended up in a shotout in the streets of Kyiv. That clash has led some commentators to speculate that an alternative explanation is the drone, which specifically targeted the office of the acting head of the SBU, could have been part of this escalating feud. No evidence of that has been presented either.

The drone hit the office of Oleksandr Poklad, acting head of the SBU, on the afternoon of September 4, who was absent at the time, Ukrainska Pravda reported. Nine people were injured in Kyiv's Shevchenkivskyi district, according to the same report; the Kyiv Independent put the figure at 12 or more.

Officers of the two agencies exchanged automatic fire outside a Kyiv apartment building on September 2, during the detention of Stepan Kaplunov, a deputy commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a HUR unit made up of Russian fighters, who has also been accused of far-right leanings. Two HUR officers were badly injured.

The SBU said Kaplunov had been tasked by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) with preparing an assassination attempt on a Russian opposition figure due to arrive in Ukraine. Kaplunov said the SBU had abducted him on August 23, held him in a "secret prison" and pressed him into confirming their account of events in a video that was later released online.

Zelenskiy said deputy heads of both agencies would be dismissed over the standoff, Ukrainska Pravda reported. Fedir Venislavskyi, a member of parliament's national security and defence committee, said after both agency chiefs briefed it behind closed doors that there had been violations on both sides, and that using firearms, above all automatic weapons, in a densely populated residential area is unacceptable.

Poklad is himself contested. Olena Shcherban, a lawyer at the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, told the Kyiv Independent that he is known inside and outside the SBU for methods that are not entirely lawful, and the centre has accused him of leading the authorities' 2025 campaign against the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.

None of that shows the drone was Ukrainian, and nobody in Kyiv has publicly said it was.

Ukraine's air force reported 121 Shahed-type drones launched overnight into September 4, half of them jet-powered, of which 103 were shot down, the Kyiv Independent reported. The time of the strike itself was in the afternoon, neither the air force nor the SBU has published a count for that part of the day, or said how the drone that reached the building was flown.