Three Ukrainian military intelligence officers were wounded in a shootout between the SBU security service and HUR military intelligence in Kyiv, their lawyer said, on September 2.

The shooting happened overnight in the Dniprovskyi district of the capital, during what the SBU called urgent investigative measures. At the centre of it is Stepan Kaplunov, deputy commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a unit of Russian nationals fighting on Ukraine's side. The independent outlet Astra and Russian law enforcement sources have described Kaplunov as a neo-Nazi, a characterisation he rejected in a CNN interview in 2022, when he called himself a Ukrainian nationalist.

An armed clash between two arms of the same wartime state, in the capital, in the fourth year of a full-scale invasion, is an unusual event and highlights the growing social tension as Ukraine moves into its fifth year of war. It has already cost one SBU department head his job, put the heads of both agencies in front of a closed parliamentary hearing, and left the two services publicly contradicting each other about a shooting their own officers took part in.

Two irreconcilable accounts

The SBU said its officers were thwarting a terrorist attack organised by Russia's FSB against, in its words, "one of the leaders of a Russian opposition political national movement". During searches it met armed resistance, and its Alpha unit opened fire "while suppressing armed resistance". Preliminary findings, the service said, indicated the attackers belonged to a unit of Ukraine's Defence Forces.

A security services source gave Meduza an account that was the opposite. Unknown men seized Kaplunov and took him to Shumska Street. HUR special forces moved to detain them and found they were SBU operatives. The situation was defused, then more SBU officers arrived and began detaining the HUR men, and a second exchange of fire followed.

The Russian Volunteer Corps said on Telegram on September 1 that Kaplunov had been abducted by unknown individuals in the courtyard of his home. He had been in Ukraine for the Independence Day commemorations on August 24.

Taras Borovskyi, acting for Kaplunov, said the SBU wounded three HUR servicemen, two of them seriously, unn.ua reported. One was shot in the leg and had an artery severed.

Borovskyi said the search was carried out at night without a court warrant, and questioned why a search was needed on September 1 if Kaplunov had been detained on August 23. He called the SBU's account of a foiled assassination a public relations move.

Zelenskiy intervenes

Zelenskiy called it an absolutely disgraceful situation and dismissed Oleg Khramov, head of the SBU's department for the protection of state secrets, Kyiv Independent reported.

Kyrylo Budanov, head of the presidential office and until January the head of HUR, said the State Bureau of Investigation and the Prosecutor General's Office were handling the case, and called for an impartial investigation.

Parliament's national security committee has summoned the acting head of the SBU, Oleksandr Poklad, and the head of HUR, Oleh Ivashchenko, to a closed meeting.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Ani Chkhikvadze traced the clash to a rivalry between Budanov and Poklad, who has run the SBU in an acting capacity since July, and reported that a source expected Ivashchenko to be removed as head of HUR. Ivashchenko took the post in January, when Budanov moved to the presidential office.

Chkhikvadze also reached back to March 2022, when SBU officers killed the Ukrainian negotiator Denys Kireyev, an episode never fully explained in public and still the reference point whenever the two services collide.

For Ukraine's foreign backers the question is narrower than the personalities. Kyiv is asking for Patriot production licences, air defence interceptors and continued budget support, all of which rest on the argument that the Ukrainian state is a competent and controllable partner. Two of its security agencies shooting at each other in the capital, then briefing opposite accounts of it, is an argument in the other direction.