Poland hands over accused Russian agent to Ukraine

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland has detained and handed over to Ukraine a man deemed an “enemy agent” by Kyiv, which says he was involved in producing propaganda for Russia, organising anti-Ukrainian protests in EU countries, and calling for terrorist attacks against Ukraine.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) say that it is the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion that such an agent has been handed over by another country.

The man in question has not been named by the Polish or Ukrainian authorities, who blurred an image of his face. However, media outlets in both countries have identified him as Kyrylo Molchanov.

He left Ukraine in 2022 and moved to Russia, where he regularly appeared as a “political expert” on Kremlin media platforms, using those appearances to “justify Russia’s armed aggression and spread fakes about the situation in Ukraine”, say the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU).

That included 35 appearances in 2023 on the talk show of Vladimir Solovyov, one of the stars of Russian state TV. The SSU says the man handed over by Poland also has ties to media linked with Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch also living in exile in Russia since 2022.

“On [Russia’s] orders, he [the suspect] discredited Ukraine in the international arena and worked to undermine the internal situation in…partners of Ukraine,” added the SSU, who accuse the man of working for Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

The SSU says that the man also “organised street rallies in the EU, calling for international support for Ukraine to be cut off”, and made “public calls to prepare and carry out contracted terrorist attacks in Ukraine”.

The agency said that the suspect was detained in Poland, though it did not provide details of the circumstances in which that occurred. He was then handed over to Ukraine, which is holding him in pretrial detention.

This was “the first time since the beginning of the full-scale invasion [that] an enemy agent who worked against Ukraine in the information sphere was handed over to Ukraine”, note the SSU.

Speaking to broadcaster TVN, Poland’s interior minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, said that the suspect had been handed over to Ukraine as part of “standard cooperation between law-abiding states”.

“Ukrainians help us in various matters, and we help Ukrainians,” he added. “This is natural in a situation where the enemy is common…I have full confidence that the Ukrainian security services and the Ukrainian justice system will deal with such a person properly.”

Siemoniak noted that Poland has itself suffered a spate of acts of sabotage carried out on behalf of Russia but often perpetrated by Ukrainian citizens. “Cooperation with Ukraine is [therefore] absolutely essential for us.”

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: SSU

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.