Alleged Moscow agent, on trial for high treason, reached the top ranks of Ukrainian intelligence on the eve of war
Maxim Tucker
February 8, 2025
The Sunday Times
At a fashionable Moscow address a few blocks from the Russian prime minister’s office stands a gated office complex. It is on the north bank of the Moskva, just across the river from Stalin’s towering Hotel Ukraine and a few minutes from one of Moscow’s best known Ukrainian restaurants. Those aren’t the only Ukrainian connections in the area.
Inside the complex at 12 Krasnopresnenskaya is the headquarters, secret until now, of an international spy network that infiltrated the highest ranks of President Zelensky’s government.
The operation is run by Vladimir Sivkovich, a grey-haired businessman with a luxuriant moustache who was once the deputy chief of Ukraine’s national security council. He fled Kyiv a decade ago, accused of giving orders to shoot dead nearly a hundred of the pro-European protesters who in 2014 brought down the pro-Kremlin regime he served.
Today, Ukraine says he works for the FSB, the main Russian successor agency to the Soviet KGB, and alleges that he masterminded a network of Russian agents working in Ukraine, Britain and the US to return Kyiv to the Kremlin’s control. ‘One of those agents, said to be Sivkovich’s best, is on trial behind closed doors for high treason 500 miles to the southwest, in Kyiv. Oleh Kulinich enjoyed a stellar career in Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, rising to become a senior commander — and a trusted aide to the chief of Zelensky’s political party. “Kulinich was the most valued Russian FSB agent in Ukraine,” a senior Ukrainian counterintelligence official said. “His activities can be compared to those of Kim Philby, who destroyed MI6 from the inside. His position allowed him access to vital secret data about defence capability.”
Details of the pair’s alleged crimes can be revealed for the first time by The Sunday Times, based on a trove of messages provided by an American source, documents seized from a computer in Moscow, conversations with former Zelensky administration officials, lobbying reports filed with the US Department of Justice, and information revealed in the treason trial.
This evidence suggests Russian agents were able to carve out a highly sensitive consultancy role in Zelensky’s presidential campaign team, and then after he had won, manoeuvre Kulinich into a crucial position as head of the Crimea branch of the SBU. It left him ideally positioned to assess Ukraine’s preparations for any possible invasion by Russia — and to undermine them.
The US lawyer and the ‘kompromat’
On a spring day in April 2018, an American lawyer with a shock of white hair strolled through Vienna on his way to meet the VIP client he had travelled from Los Angeles to see. Described as slick and persuasive, Marcus Cohen was exactly what Vladimir Sivkovich was looking for.
Sivkovich had made contact a year earlier with a request that seemed legitimate enough. Cohen was to gather information from US law enforcement about corruption and money-laundering investigations into the spymaster and his associates in Moscow, part of an attempt to make plea deals and avoid prosecution.
Yet as the list of clients grew, others at Cohen’s law firm developed doubts, suspecting he was actually gathering kompromat — compromising information — against people he was not authorised to act for. Those concerns were not established, and Cohen left the firm.
In August 2018, Cohen met Sivkovich — this time with Kulinich — in Vienna again. Cohen had just received a report that he had commissioned into Ukraine’s top anti-corruption prosecutor, whose tenacity was making it harder for the Kremlin to buy influence in Ukraine. He passed the report, which The Sunday Times has seen, to the two intelligence operatives.
Cohen messaged the financial crime consultant who had prepared it for him. “At this moment, I am sitting with a ‘former’ KGB General and an SBU Commander,” he noted. “Both of them were impressed with [the] summary. Much appreciated.”
Sivkovich, the spymaster, had been a reserve general in the KGB. Cohen’s use of quotation marks around “former” suggest he at least suspected he was dealing with an active Russian intelligence agent.
Two years later, the prosecutor was forced to resign. Ukrainian intelligence later found a further 15 files on him on the FSB computer they managed to access in Moscow. In 2019, Sivkovich paid his US lawyer at least $300,000, according to intelligence subsequently gathered by the SBU and confirmed by Kulinich’s lawyers.
Cohen did not respond to requests to comment on the allegations. Lawyers for Kulinich and Sivkovich confirmed the meetings, but say they were simply co-operating with US law enforcement to help them investigate corruption.
Infiltrating Team Zelensky
As the relationship between Cohen and Sivkovich deepened, a young television star was surging onto the stage of Ukrainian politics off the back of his political satire show, Servant of the People.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 presidential campaign married a promise to clean up corruption with the prospect of making peace with Vladimir Putin over the five-year-old war in the Donbas.
His campaign team was engaged in a bitter power struggle with the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, and any old hands prepared to help them were welcomed with little due diligence.
Cohen, who was touring Kyiv offering free lobbying expertise, knew someone he thought could help, and introduced Kulinich to Zelensky’s campaign team as a political expert who would
work on the campaign pro bono, according to Kulinich’s lawyers. Kulinich had been a senior adviser to a number of government ministers and held a senior position at the national nuclear power agency, which helped to bolster his credibility. Both men ended up at campaign HQ, working to get Zelensky elected and connected in Washington.
Cohen contracted lobbyists and security consultants on the campaign’s behalf. These contractors were actually paid by Sivkovich in Moscow through shell companies, Kulinich’s lawyers said, maintaining this was part of his legitimate activity as a political consultant.
Among the documents seen by The Sunday Times is a $185,250 contract with a London-based firm, Global Analytica, in March 2019. Ostensibly this was a company of reputable British security experts who would provide “personal security for Mr Volodymyr Zelensky, a candidate in the upcoming contest for the presidency of the country of Ukraine’, including “cyber security” and the provision of seven “secure” smartphones for Zelensky and his team. No one in the Zelensky camp noticed that the company was incorporated in March 2019, only a month beforehand.
A long-term mole
After Zelensky won the election by a landslide in April 2019, he appointed his campaign chief and childhood friend, Ivan Bakanov, to head the SBU intelligence service. In a lobbying document filed with the US Department of Justice, Cohen stated he had worked on Zelensky’s campaign and was now working for Bakanov and the Zelensky administration more broadly.
He claimed to have paid $70,000 of his own money to a Washington lobbying firm to secure introductions to members of the Trump administration. Kulinich worked with him on the influence operation. Their impact, particularly on opening up conversations in the US, was welcomed by Zelensky, said a source who worked with the administration.
In 2020, Kulinich was rewarded with an appointment to head the SBU’s Crimea department, where he was expected to act as an early warning system for any sign that Russia was preparing to strike north from the occupied peninsula.
Instead, prosecutors say, he sought to undermine Ukraine’s defences through encouraging corruption, diverting resources from counterintelligence. “Kulinich managed to destabilise the work of this SBU directorate. He destroyed their counterintelligence work. In April 2021 he initiated large-scale anti-terrorism training in the Kherson region, which he used to identify weaknesses in Ukraine’s defence,” an SBU officer claimed.
According to messages shared by the SBU, purportedly sent by Kulinich, he gathered information about Zelensky’s movements and passed them to the Russians.
But he was beginning to arouse suspicions. An SBU counterintelligence officer, Vasyl Maliuk, noticed that he was making trips abroad at the same time as Sivkovich, whom Ukrainian intelligence had been monitoring for years. They began tracking Kulinich too.
In January 2022, the British government named Sivkovich as one of four former Ukrainian politicians in contact with the Russian intelligence services and the US sanctioned him on the
grounds that he was “engaged in Russian government-directed influence activities to destabilise Ukraine”.
To catch a spy
One month later, in the early hours of February 24, 2022, Putin unleashed the biggest assault on a European country since the Second World War, his troops attacking Ukraine from the north, east and south.
Kulinich knew about the plan to invade from Crimea, but prevented evidence of the preparations from being communicated to Kyiv, prosecutors allege. “During the early hours of the invasion, he blocked any attempts to notify the SBU leadership about the real situation in the region,” an SBU official claimed. “He didn’t take measures to protect state sovereignty and disobeyed orders by taking his staff to another region. He even took weapons away from SBU employees.” He was sacked the next week. The net was closing. Kulinich was arrested on 16 July, 2022, accused of passing state secrets to the Russians.
Incriminating evidence had been found in hundreds of documents seized by the SBU from a computer in Moscow and in a subsequent raid on a Kyiv apartment. They include photographs and videos of Kulinich and Sivkovich family members abroad together, as well as images of Kulinich with a man who has been called an “active Russian FSB agent” by the US government. There are also messages from Kulinich to Sivkovich, the spymaster.
Both men deny working for the FSB. Kulinich’s trial continues. If convicted he faces up to 15 years in prison. His detention led to a major purge of the SBU, and the dismissal of Bakanov three days later, to be replaced by Maliuk, the counterintelligence officer who brought Kulinich down. The purge is still under way today.
Maxim Tucker was Kyiv correspondent for The Times between 2014 and 2017 and is now an editor on the foreign desk. He has returned to report from the frontlines of the war in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. He advises on grantmaking in the former Soviet countries for the Open Society Foundations and prior to that was Amnesty International’s Campaigner on Ukraine and the South Caucasus. He has also written for The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Newsweek and Politico.