Gunfight Between Ukraine's Own Spy Agencies Erupts in Central Kyiv

Officers from Ukraine's SBU domestic security service and HUR military intelligence directorate exchanged gunfire in central Kyiv on the morning of 3 September 2026, leaving several people injured and drawing a sharp rebuke from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who called the incident "disgraceful" (The Guardian).

The clash appeared to have been triggered by the SBU's recent arrest of a Russian national, identified as Kaplunov, who had been fighting for Ukraine under HUR supervision (The Guardian; The Independent). According to the SBU, Kaplunov had been contacted by an individual operating on behalf of Russia's FSB intelligence service, who sought to recruit him to assassinate Ukrainian defence personnel and other individuals. The SBU released a video of Kaplunov in which he made these claims (The Guardian).

Kaplunov's lawyer contested the SBU's account, saying the video was recorded under pressure and was being released to "whitewash" the shootout. Kaplunov has since been released from SBU custody. HUR personnel and Kaplunov's lawyers accused SBU officers of illegally detaining him (The Guardian; The Independent).

Local media reported that shots were fired while the SBU was searching an apartment linked to its investigation. Three HUR officers were injured in the shootout, two of them seriously wounded (The Guardian; Kyiv Independent). Separately, the Kyiv Post reported that HUR servicemen fired at SBU officers while the SBU was working to foil an FSB operation (Kyiv Post).

The SBU said it had, together with the HUR, foiled a Russian-backed terrorist plot targeting a Russian opposition leader who had recently arrived in Ukraine (The Guardian). The exact sequence of events that turned a joint counterintelligence operation into an armed confrontation between two Ukrainian agencies remains contested.

Hours after the shootout, Zelenskyy dismissed Oleh Khramov, the SBU's head of the department for the protection of state secrets (The Guardian). The president said the shooting needed to be investigated by both the SBU and the HUR, and Ukraine's main investigative agency has opened an investigation. Zelenskyy said that shooting in Ukraine is permitted only at Russian occupiers and that the state would never regard any other shootout as acceptable (The Guardian).

The shootout occurred against a backdrop of sustained Russian pressure on the capital. Russian drone strikes hit Kyiv for a seventh consecutive day, injuring at least 13 people, according to reporting from 2 September (Kyiv Independent). In a separate incident on Thursday morning, a 71-year-old man was shot outside a medical clinic in Kyiv and remained in serious condition, with the Kyiv city prosecutor's office launching an attempted murder investigation (The Guardian).

The broader context here is one of institutional friction within Ukraine's wartime security apparatus at a moment of acute external threat. The SBU and HUR operate in overlapping operational spaces, and both have been central to Ukraine's counterintelligence and special operations efforts throughout the war. Think of it as two departments in the same company whose responsibilities blur at the edges: when a Russian national serving in one agency's units becomes the target of a counterintelligence investigation by another, the fault lines can quickly deepen. The competing narratives, the SBU framing the arrest as a disruption of an FSB recruitment operation, and HUR and Kaplunov's defence team alleging illegal detention, point to a breakdown in inter-agency coordination that escalated to lethal force on the streets of the capital.

The duelling accounts from the SBU and HUR also raise questions about the credibility of publicly released evidence. The SBU's dissemination of Kaplunov's video confession, and the subsequent claim by his lawyer that it was recorded under coercion and served to "whitewash" the shootout, creates a contested evidentiary record that the formal investigation will need to resolve. Kaplunov's release from SBU custody suggests the legal basis for his detention was, at minimum, fragile.

Zelenskyy's immediate dismissal of Khramov signals an appetite for accountability at the senior level, though the SBU's state secrets protection department is not an obvious locus of the operational failure that produced the shootout. The dismissal may reflect broader dissatisfaction with the SBU's internal controls, or it may target a specific lapse not yet publicly detailed.