Wartime Ukraine’s domestic political dynamics have always been murky, but no objective observer hitherto doubted the existence of factions within its military, intelligence, security, and political institutions nor the existence of rivalries between them, which have just been confirmed. The GUR and SBU, respectively Ukraine’s military intelligence and secret police, engaged in a shootout last week after the SBU temporarily detained a Russian Neo-Nazi whose militia operates under the GUR’s patronage.
That preceded a mysterious drone attack against the SBU’s headquarters in Kiev that Zelensky blamed on Russia but which some, such as the popular “Russians With Attitude” podcasting duo, reasonably suggested could have been the GUR’s “plausibly deniable” retaliation against the SBU. Whatever the truth may be, the newly violent GUR-SBU rivalry follows summer’s brief large-scale protests in support of the recently dismissed Defense Minister, which this analysis here argued were connected to the US.
The larger trend concerns Ukrainians souring on Zelensky as a result of his suspected corruption after many speculated that the ongoing investigation into the country’s ruling clique, which already took down his grey cardinal Andrey Yermak, implicates him in some capacity. This isn’t “wishful thinking” like skeptics might scoff but was even discussed in detail by Foreign Policy magazine, which cited a recent Ukrainian poll showing that just how seriously public opinion has shifted against him over the past year.
Per their report, “Fully 90 percent of Ukrainians believe that corruption stands at a high or extremely high level. Most significantly and most emblematic of the shift, nearly 57 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll by SOCIS in April 2025. The SOCIS polling also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around 2-to-1.”
This context suggests that the newly violent GUR-SBU rivalry might be part of a preemptive power struggle over Ukraine’s political future when recalling that the inevitable end of the Ukrainian Conflict, whenever it happens and on whatever terms, will prompt long-overdue elections. Most interestingly, the GUR and SBU are both closely tied to the CIA while Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies are “directly controlled” by the US per Putin, thus placing American fingerprints over all of these developments.
Despite CIA influence over the GUR and SBU, they still retain some autonomy, and unpredictable spontaneity is characteristic of the entropic conditions in which they operate. This means that the US probably didn’t orchestrate their shootout, but it certainly has a stake in their rivalry, which its various “deep state” elements –potentially including rival ones – could try to shape through their influence over them. The same, albeit to a lesser extent, goes for those two’s other foreign partners like the UK.
The outcome of the GUR-SBU rivalry is therefore expected to greatly determine Ukraine’s political future. It might even do so before the war ends if one or both of them take a page from interwar Japan by carrying out a spree of political assassinations, whether on their own will or at the behest of one of their foreign patrons, which could even target Zelensky if they perceive him as supporting their rival. All that’s known for sure is that the GUR-SBU rivalry is now Ukraine’s most important domestic political dynamic.
