Security Service of Ukraine
Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny (SBU, English: Security Service of Ukraine) is Ukraine's main government security agency.
SBU is responsible for:
- state security (actually incl. secret police tasks)
- external security and non-military intelligence
- counterintelligence (incl. one inside Armed Forces)
- fighting terrorism and "crimes against state&people" (smuggling, illegal weapons/WMD materials trade etc.)
- personal security of the President, Verkhovna Rada, other highest persons/institutions (see Politics of Ukraine).
SBU is a successor of Ukrainian SSR Brunch KGB, keeping almost all of it's 1990s personnel. Competes in intelligence functions with HUR (Ukrainian: Holovne Upravlinnya Rozvidky, English: Central Intelligence Department)- military intelligence unit within Ukraine's Defence Ministry (Ukrainian: Ministersvo Oborony). Despite that, current SBU Chief Ihor Smeshko is a former HUR Chief and a career GRU technology espionage expert.
Few years ago SBU has subsumed the UDO (Ukrainian: Upravlinnya Derzhavnoyi Ohorony, English: State Guard Department) - personal security agency for highest statesmen, former Ninth Directorate of Ukrainian KGB. UDO is known by the deserting of its Mj. Mykola Mel`nychenko, communications protection officer in President Leonid Kuchma's bodyguards team. In 2000 Mel`nychenko has escaped to the West, publishing the numerous records of supposedly President's secret conversations& calls. Those records intended to prove the allegations of Kuchma's involvment in kidnapping and beaheding of Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze (see "Casette Scandal"), as well as in other crimes. The supposed voice of former SBU Chief Leonid Derkach is widely present in Mel`nychenko`s records, i.e. discussing clandestine relations with Russian mafia leader Semyon Mogilevich.
Later Gen. Valery Kravchenko, SBU's intelligence resident in Germany, publicly accused his agency of political invovlment, incl. abroad spying on Ukrainian opposition politicians and German TV journalists. Kravchenko was fired without returning home and now remains in Germany privately.