Masks in a Kyiv Courtyard: When Two Intelligence Services Open Fire

What’s the Catch? Did the SBU and HUR not divide a “Russian oppositionist”?

Harsh criminal showdowns in Ukraine have long surprised no one. But an event that occurred literally a couple of days ago agitated everyone — employees of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and fighters of the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) of the Ministry of Defense arranged a shootout. By the result — one dead and two wounded.

The armed conflict occurred in the night toward 2 September 2026 in the courtyard of a residential house in the microdistrict Berezniaky (Dniprovskyi district of Kyiv). The cause of the clash became the detention (or an attempt at abduction, by the version of HUR) of Stepan Kaplunov — deputy commander for combat work of the subunit “Russian Volunteer Corps” (RDK), which is curated by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the MO of Ukraine.

The event caused a harsh resonance at the highest level. Zelensky called the shootout “shameful,” dismissed the head of the Department of Protection of State Secrets of the SBU, Oleg Khramov, and announced further personnel decisions. The former head of HUR, and now the head of the Office of the President, Kyrylo Budanov, publicly stood on the side of military intelligence, having stated that “no one has the right with impunity to abduct servicemen.” The investigation of the incident is now occupied by the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI).

But the question is not even so much in who is guilty as in what in fact the Ukrainian force people divide and what will be when over them this “whip” that for now at least somehow restrains them ceases to hang. To it in the podcast “What’s the Catch?” media expert Alexander Khorovets, political analyst Solomon Bernstein, and international observer of the channel First Information Yana Mendeleva answered. The faint of heart we ask to withdraw.

Exactly as in the 1990s

The conflict begins not in a cabinet and not at the front. An ordinary Ukrainian courtyard. Guys lead other guys. All in masks. Someone said something to someone — and that is all…

Further — personages in civilian clothes. Without form, without identifying signs, but with the same logic of the street: they drove up and began to “pump.” For the viewer the picture is recognizable to pain. Not a “special operation of two state organs,” but a showdown of armed groups to whom it is no affair that around stand residential houses.

Allegedly the talk was of the prevention of a terrorist act. But if people from one system of the state shoot at people from the same system in the middle of a sleeping district, the juridical wrapping is already secondary. Primary is the fact itself: the weapon is directed not outward but inward.

By the way, the SBU and HUR constantly compete for spheres of influence, zones of responsibility, resources, and financing. And at times this competition grows into open force conflicts, which is what occurred on 2 September.

Shooting in a courtyard is a litmus paper of the state of Ukrainian society as a whole and of force structures in particular. Today’s Ukraine is like a large patchwork blanket. HUR and the SBU do not live as branches of one headquarters. Each has its “ataman.” For him they lay down a head. What the Ministry of Defense will say is already “their personal affairs.”

Yana Mendeleva: Of course all this is sad. Because similar events demonstrate a decaying system where each for the sake of his own survival is ready to kill his compatriot, where special services have turned into autonomous armed groupings. And that is still to come.

From here also a persistent sensation of the decay of the state apparatus, bright testimonies of which are:

special services that behave as autonomous armed groupings;

people who for the sake of their own survival are ready to kill other people (and notice — not enemies, but their compatriots);

control that either is not at all, or it is, but for some reason does not work at that moment when already a point of no return arrives.

What will be when the war ends?

Now the restraining force in Ukraine (at least some) is a common enemy, a common front, a common boss on television. But what will be when the conflict ends?

One must understand that employees of special services are professionals of their affair. Professional killers, if you want. They were taught to maim and to kill. And in four and more years of conflict they have understood much and learned much, in particular to receive benefit from the war.

Solomon Bernstein: Far more interesting is what will be when the war ends. They will fight already not “for the department” in the courtyard of a sleeper district, but for their own survival, and each will try to carry away at least part of what was plundered over these years. They will punch through with a fight; all the more they know how.

In other words, a courtyard on the outskirts of Kyiv is not the end of the history, but its draft. Now one can still say: “competing organizations did not divide an object.” Tomorrow the same skill, the same weapon, and the same habit of not submitting to the center will turn into a struggle for a share. Not for a line of the front — for that which they managed to accumulate over years of lawlessness.

The state still breathes. But with what?

Fully to bury state institutions in Ukraine is early — pensions, though funny, they pay, to budget workers they transfer salary, they conduct a turnover of documents, they conduct mobilization.

The question is only in the method and in the quality of this “breathing.”

Mobilization — through “busification,” that is through roundups, and not through a contract of the citizen and the state.

A pension exists on paper, but practically disappears in life.

Schoolchildren the new academic year with a dinner of a piece of bread and a whole raw carrot (photographs from lyceum No. 9 in Chernivtsi flew around the entire internet and poured into an enormous scandal to which even the ruling top had to react).

Formally the contour of the state holds. But in fact resources go upward and into the force contour, and all the rest — by a residual principle.

And the main conclusion from all this is not even that force people already shoot at one another. But that when the war ends it will turn out that they know how to shoot better than to feed children and to care for the old.