We Must Sharply Intensify Our Intelligence Behind Separation Line of Forces in Donbas - Chief of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, Kyrylo Budanov

Chief of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine Kyrylo Budanov considers his short-term goal to intensify intelligence in Donbas, and long-term goal - to increase the level of intelligence readiness, including "extracting and reading" information.

"The short-term goals are obvious. First of all, this is a sharp intensification of our intelligence behind the line of separation of forces in Donbas. We must carefully verify and disassemble any manifestations of the activity of that side in order to exclude or suppress provocations," Budanov told Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday.

He also said that "the presidential peace plan is the keystone at present."

Kyrylo Budanov was appointed as Chief of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine by the presidential decree on August 5, 2020.

Among other tasks, Budanov called "increasing the level of technical, technologic and managerial readiness of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, including the introduction of specific new technological solutions in our intelligence functions and, above all, solutions on extracting or reading information." He also noted the need to "restructure analytical work in such a way as to obtain more coherent predictive conclusions in a shorter time." "Another direction is the development, in fact, in the online mode, of detailed scenarios of our responses to certain external and internal stimuli," the Chief of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine said.

In speaking of threat to the security of Ukraine, Kyrylo Budanov said that "wars of a new type which involve not only military groupings but also civilian units, and which are ideally masked by various powerful propaganda programmes." "We have to learn to separate military component in these potential conflicts, to indicate its presence in advance and prevent the possibility of beginning military conflicts," he noted.

The DIU's chief said that any country currently faces the following risks: "global world, open borders, quick extraction of any information, numerous centers of unfriendly intentions, sharp increasing technical capabilities to initiate certain clashes. And all of these is money and modernization."

"I would like to especially emphasize that in some countries there is a strong tendency to intensify various hybrid actions against our country in order to push towards a certain vector of development, beneficial for these countries but not for us. Thus, our task is to assess all the military capabilities of any potential adversary in advance and in full," he said.

According to Kyrylo Budanov, he is a native-born of Kyiv, studied at Odesa Land Forces Institute. "After graduation, almost all of my service took place in the DIU's Special Forces. From 2018 to 2020, I was at special work, and from the middle of 2020 was as deputy director of department at the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine," he said.

When asked to comment on the publications of a number of media outlets about the operation that was carried out in the Crimea in August 2016, and which is associated with the assassination attempt on him in 2019, K.Budanov said, "No comments."

In April 2020, journalist Yurii Butusov wrote that in April 2019, a russian diversionist tried to blow up Budanov's car. According to him, this attempt was a revenge for the raid of a group of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine in the territory of the occupied Crimea, during which a lieutenant colonel of the russian Vympel unit was killed.