Zelenskyy calls a Kyiv spy-agency shootout ‘absolutely shameful’ and fires an SBU officer

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered investigations and personnel action after units of Ukraine's domestic security service, the SBU, and its military intelligence directorate, HUR, exchanged fire in a Kyiv courtyard on 2 September. Three HUR officers were wounded. One was reported in serious condition.

The clash took place overnight and into the morning on Yurii Shumskyi Street in the Berezniaky district. Zelenskyy, in his evening address, called it an "absolutely shameful" and "absolutely disgraceful" incident. "Here in Ukraine, shooting is only permissible at Russian occupiers in defence of Ukraine," he said. He told both service chiefs to discipline those involved, opened a prosecutor's inquiry, and dismissed a senior SBU officer.

The two accounts do not meet. SBU first said its officers had worked with HUR to stop a Russian terrorist plot. A later statement said an SBU operational group conducting a search for a pre-trial investigation into an FSB-organised terrorist act was attacked by a group of armed men. Alpha, the SBU special-forces unit, then opened fire and detained three people who "belong to one of the units of Ukraine's defence forces." Weapons and documents were seized. The SBU said the injured were among those who resisted.

HUR's version, relayed by Ukrainian outlets citing service sources, is that SBU officers abducted Stepan Kaplunov, deputy commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a Russian anti-Kremlin unit that fights under HUR. The aim, those sources said, was to extract compromising material on HUR and on Kyrylo Budanov, the former HUR chief who now heads the Presidential Office. HUR says its officers were unarmed when they tried to stop SBU from taking detained comrades away in handcuffs, and that only SBU fired. SBU sources say HUR fired first after investigative steps in Kaplunov's apartment, and that SBU aimed at legs.

The State Bureau of Investigation has taken the file. Ruslan Kahanets reported that investigators detained three special-forces officers from the Fifth Directorate of the SBU Counterintelligence Department, including Oleksandr Bova. Those names have not been independently confirmed in court papers. HUR itself has not issued a detailed public statement.

The feud has a history that predates the courtyard. SBU is Ukraine's internal service, closer to an FBI than to a foreign-intelligence shop. HUR runs military intelligence and a set of armed units, including Russian and Belarusian volunteer formations that fight inside the occupied territories and inside Russia. Both services have grown in money, prisoners, captured kit and political weight since 2022. Budanov's move from HUR to the Presidential Office earlier this year put a former military-intelligence chief next to the president and left the SBU, under acting head Oleksandr Poklad, competing for the same files.

The timing made the episode worse. Kyiv was on its sixth straight day of Russian drone strikes, a run Ukrainian officials described as an attempt to paralyse economic life. A gunfight between two Ukrainian services in a residential yard, while air-raid alerts were still part of the night, handed Moscow an easy line and handed Zelenskyy a problem he cannot treat as a misunderstanding.

What the investigation must settle is narrow and ugly: who had a warrant, who was armed, who fired first, and whether Kaplunov was a lawful detainee or a bargaining chip in a fight between Budanov's old service and Poklad's current one. What it cannot settle in a single file is the larger fact that two wartime intelligence services now treat each other as a threat. Zelenskyy's instruction that only Russians may be shot at is a political sentence. The courtyard in Berezniaky is the operational one.